Today I have spent an inordinate time messing around with Celtic knot stuff, and in particular the Celtic Knot Thingy program. I'm not even going to attempt to compile all the scribbles and notes and piles of scribbled spaghetti I made today in an attempt to figure out how to make good-looking Celtic knots. Well, I was about ready to throw in the towel, until I discovered a very cool tool that can procedurally generate knots within a certain set of parameters. It took a bit of rummaging to get it working for me in Linux Mint, but I'll explain what I did:
First, go here, and download the files: http://www.isotropic.org/celticknot/howto/
Then you need to get one dependency installed. Open your terminal and type in:
sudo apt-get install tcl
Then when that's done, navigate your terminal to the place where you put both the start.ps and knot.tcl files, and type in:
wish knot.tcl
And you'll find up with a window with sliders, as shown in the image above. Set the sliders how you like, and press "open window" to bring up the mirror editor. Hold left mouse button over a node and drag to add mirrors, and use right click in the same way to remove them. Push the "postscript" button to generate an output file with your knot design, which should just open right up in your postscript viewer of choice. That's it!
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