[metapost] Designing Brahmi DDHA

[Shriramana Sharma]

Hello list. I have previously posted about my work on palaeographic
Indic scripts. I'm right now tackling the grandmother of them all --
Brahmi. Since Brahmi is largely like stick figures (with all due
respect to King Ashoka) I didn't have the patience to do it the Meta*
way yet. I clipped glyphs from Senart's Les Inscriptions de Piyadasi
and drew straight lines on top of them. The few simple curves were not
an issue, but when I came to DDHA I was stumped because it was the
only highly-curved glyph and my Inkscape-designed glyph did not look
good at all. (I still have my suspicions about its age but Indoskript
says it's from BCE 252 so, well...)

So I had the idea of getting the nodes from Inkscape and making MPost
draw a "smooth" curve instead and I have to say I am most pleased with
the results. :-) Thank you all whose work has gone into MPost (and the
other tools I used)! :-)

Those interested might like to investigate the attached files.

BTW because Inkscape has y values increasing downwards but Mpost has
them increasing upwards, the final glyph is upside down. (I had to be
careful with using the directions up/down inside the .mp file because
of this.) Looking at the MPost manual there doesn't seem to be any
built-in transform to do "flip vertical" on a path as is found in
popular vector-drawing applications.

I am thinking of something like:

def flipvertical ( path p )
	begingroup ;
		numeric pleft, pright, phalfheight ;
		phalfheight = ( ypart llcorner p + ypart urcorner p ) / 2 ;
		pleft = xpart llcorner p ;
		pright = xpart urcorner p ;
		p := p reflectedabout ( ( pleft, phalfheight ), ( pright, phalfheight ) ) ;
	endgroup ;
enddef ;

But I am not sure whether the above will work correctly. I think I
cannot create a transform out of this because a transform must be
defined even for single points but flip horizontal/vertical are valid
only for paths with more than one points. Can anyone please help me
how to implement a flipvertical?

Thanks!

-- 
Shriramana Sharma
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