I would like to dedicate my PhD thesis for the dear ones who unconditionally supported to see me through to the other side.
I intend to do the honours through the ancient keralite tradition of scribing on a Thaliyola with a Narayam. This practice is roughly equivalent to the western tradition of messengers in olden-day courts delivering announcements/invitations in a vellum parchment with the content scribed with a feather quill.
The only image I could find was from Wikimedia commons,
by Musafir, Sreejithk2000, 8 Jan 2008. Licensed CC-BY-SA.
I would like to typeset something using Tikz or native latex for the parchment background (and obviously the text that will be scribed on) using xetex
or luatex
since overlaying text on this image seems suboptimal.
As a first thought, it sounds like the I could use a Tikz node with jagged edges (given in the tutorial sections of the tikz manual), some shadowing and use a wooden texture filling, but there could be some better alternatives out there for this naive thinking. For the Narayam, I might simply have to drop it, since it is a real-world solid rather than some typographically amenable shape.
May I seek help from the community towards achieving this? I am looking for some creative suggestions something along the lines of the answers to the Cthulhu worshipping mad-man question.
What I specifically need help with
- One could borrow and adapt the parchment idea (though I am not clear
how) from the Cthulhu question. What I want to know is how to obtain
the randomness associated with the jagged orientation due to the
uneven cuts/burrs (projections). The jagged shape given in Tikz
manual's
tutorial section titled tutorial 5:Diagrams as simple graphs
(page 66) seems like a good starting point, but the randomness seems
rather methodic, rather than something that could be passed of as
cut & dried palm leaves. Also notice the dent in the bottom leaf. In this context, as a distant connection,
one is reminded of David Carlisle's
typewriter package wherein the
grayness, angles and everything are pseudo-randomly assigned to
monospaced characters and is a work of beauty. I wonder if some
ideas can be extended to this case, maybe programmed through a
lua
backend. - The bruises and scratches in the wood grain, especially the dark wood of the upper leaf. The tikz manual's patterns section (page 666) does not have a wooden texture options (and mostly consists of regular stuff like checkerboard, stripes etc.).
- How to punch a jagged hole and connect the two leaves with a white thread?
The Chulthu question provides only a basic parchment background (with uniform edges) and does not provide clues to these specific questions.