What the geometry says about a tear
A slit in a woven cloth, with the ends ahead of the tip gathered into the group that will break together. How many can gather is the opening divided by the slack in each gap, and the slack is the thread spacing less the thread diameter — an expression with no weave in it at all.
2 essays call
tear. The drawing above is what it returns with no arguments at all; every
call below passes it something, because a placement that passes nothing draws whichever
member of the family the generator happens to default to rather than the weave its essay
argues about.
Where it is called
Changing this generator changes every one of these figures.
Weaves
Does a loose weave tear better
The trade says a twill tears stronger than a plain weave of the same yarn, because fewer interlacings let the threads group. The geometry of that grouping has no weave in it at all — and where the geometry does speak, it predicts the opposite.
Cloth doing a job
A tear stops where the grip is
This collection asked whether a loose weave tears better and had to answer that the geometry could not say — it supplies a grip count and a slack, and neither is a force. The fancy weaves brought a friction. With it the question has an answer — a cloth's threads slide up to a computable sett and break above it — and a ripstop grid has a bound with no free parameter in it.