Given an arbitrary path in Latex, e.g. drawn with Tikz, I want to surround this path by a larger path which has a fixed distance to the original path, e.g. 1 cm.
Note that this is really only a sketch and in the sketch the distance of the outer path to the inner path is not constant, though it should be. I read the term for my problem would be "offset", yet I could not find out, how I can realize that.
I currently do not have Latex code for this sketch. One can also consider a rectangle surrounded by a larger rectangle for an easy example - the important thing is, that the outer path is generated using a generic code, that can be applied to any path.
The intended use case for this is to draw sewing patterns, the outer path then marks the seam allowance.
Update
Here is a minimal working example for the original path:
\pagestyle{empty}
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
% I know this could be drawn with a single
% use of \draw, but in reality my figures
% will be more complicated and will also be created
% using multiple \draw calls.
\draw (0,3) -- (2,7) -- (4,3);
\draw (4,3) -- (3,0) -- (1,0) -- (0,3);
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
This code leads to
How would one add a surrounding path as requested without manually drawing the same figure again, just larger (with manually calculated coordinates) ?
I also like to limit my question a little bit: Arbitrary path is too general, I can't describe it in words, but the things I will be drawing won't be too complicated. A generic way for this provided path example should likely work on other paths I will be drawing.
copy shadow
but it won't work for arbitrary paths.spy
your path with some scale...spy
library ? (for example, in Can we mirror a part in tikz?)