A system and method of providing a transformable region that may be used on graphics devices having different resolutions. The original path and geometric data of the region, as well as all operations performed on the data, are preserved when generating the region. The device-independent region can be described by a hierarchical tree, wherein the leaf nodes contain path or rectangle, ellipse, pie, and polygon data and the branch nodes contain the operations to be performed on the regions. As the tree is traversed and regions are used, they are converted to a device resolution-specific from such that the operations are performed on device resolution-specific regions. Matrix transformation operations (e.g., translate, scale, skew and rotate) can be applied because the original path information is preserved and if the region is to be used in a device having a different resolution or a subsequent matrix operation is to be applied to the region, the tree can be re-traversed.