Don Lancaster's Simply Marbelous

Please note that the Guru's Lair is best used with larger display systems. Especially for our many ebooks, classic .pdf files and high detail images.

There are some disgustingly elegant and absolutely minimalist methods of faking the marbeling once used in traditional book fly leafs. These remain of intense interest by scrapbook enthusiasts.

While intended to mimic classic book cover marbleizing, they have far greater potential for anywhere you want a computer to do something that does not look like it was done on a computer.

Basically what you have is an incredibly powerful artwork generator that uses astonishingly short PostScript code sequences to generate huge areas of "not quite" symmetrical patterns that appear distinctly non-computer and incredibly complex.

The code starts out as a stack of "pancakes", each one smaller than its next lower neighbor. Distortions are then introduced progressively for each pancake outer edge. Despite its often remarkably similar looking results, the math is wildly different from classic flyleaf marbleizing.

Marbleizing clearly possesses "self UNsimilarity", and are thus sort of the exact opposite of the fractal "self similar subsets" Mandelbrot concepts.

They also open doors to new and horribly efficient methods of doing all sorts of computer synthesized artwork that does not at all look like in the least that it was done on a computer.

An apparent marbeling guru would be Aubrey Jaffer. Also, many thanks to Robert Ackermann for his valuable insights and many coding examples. There is also an "old way" International Marbling Network.

Your input welcome.

Note that certain .eml files may need copied to an email server or decompressor for plaintext viewing of included images..

Note that marble11 and three_pancakes outputs are Acrobat .jpg files. The others are .png images.

To use, just send any .psl textfiles to Acrobat Distiller or GhostScript or Google Cloud.

The three_pancakes.psl file shows us how this scheme works. A pile of pancakes is created sequentially with the largest on the bottom. The angle-vs-radius of each pancake edge gets modified by a fancy function "F" Nonlinear Transform. Colors are sequentially changed through a rotated set.

What is utterly amazing is that the PostScript .psl code for typical presentations can be as short as a few hundred bytes! Or even less with this stunt.

While the usual output looks quite a bit like traditional "floating oil" marbeling, its actual approach is wildly different and totally unrelated..

Much more on PostScript here, here, here, and here.

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