
In a previous post, we saw how to specify in SVG an “include” external file that will contain reusable baseline design templaces.
We then created our first one: a 6-liner we called Template A.
Now comes the exciting part, reproducing a classic Islamic pattern based on this template.
The design I chose from Eric Broug’s book appears on p.88, in the Mamluk Koran frontispiece tutorial section.
As you can see in Figure 1, it’s a tesselation based on repeating the following pattern, which we will refer to as Pattern 1.

In Broug’s book, it takes 17 increasingly complex steps — using pen, pencil, paper, ruler and compass — to produce this pattern.
In a future post, I’ll see if I can figure out how to mimick a simplified version of this process on a computer screen using a plain text file editor, built-in SVG shapes, and basic math.
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