Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX (github.com)

276 pointsby nanna18 hours ago47 comments

kjraym an hour ago

I was recently made aware that my repo was mentioned here (thanks nanna).

Thanks for posting your thoughts, either way you go - I respect your opinions.

On the Reddit post (https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1xixznw/how_do_you_m...), I promised I would share the process I used to create the v1.0 release, so I thought it fitting to include that here as well, for anyone interested. I hope you find it useful!

https://github.com/kevinraymond/florilegium/blob/main/PROCES...

fock 9 minutes ago

but this is not what was searched for on reddit? sadly it shows. the reddit thing is beautiful, your thing is... ok compared to it.

lkm0 15 hours ago

In the same vein, a few years ago, somebody implemented procedural decorations for a recreation of Byrne's "Elements of Euclid" in LaTeX: https://github.com/jemmybutton/byrne-euclid

(bottom of the readme)

archermarks 15 hours ago

Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.

artursapek 13 hours ago

It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.

watersb 9 hours ago

I've recently spent some time staring at the contents of the MacTeX Distribution.

https://tug.org/mactex/

Which is how I discovered Toby Thruston's classic, "Drawing with MetaPost".

https://github.com/thruston/Drawing-with-Metapost

Procedural drawing with Lua is lovely. MetaPost provides another drawing language that might be considered more TeX-like.

I'm not sure. I tend to be humbled by the TeX community. Inspired.

scott_codie 13 hours ago

In the reddit post, it is clear the person who came up with this didn't want it to be copied. I feel sad for that person.

anamexis 12 hours ago

Why? I'm sure basically any closed product would prefer that there were no open source copies, but why feel sad for them?

bluerooibos 12 hours ago

> The creator prefers to keep the source closed to avoid code critiques

That doesn't sound like someone who doesn't want their idea copied.

mathisfun123 4 hours ago

as in the reddit post: "dawg the flowers are pretty and look cool its not that deep"

ClaraForm 15 hours ago

This is beautiful, thank you!

I just asked Deepseek 4.1 Flash to convert it to an Obsidian extension that uses the file-name as the seed, and the result [1] is exactly something I've been dreaming of for so many years while I take daily notes.

[1] imagepaste.org/i/8zu627ud.png

whimsicalism 16 hours ago

I think the phrase 'florilegium' must be an AI basin of sorts as I've had it suggested by AI as a name for a few projects of my own.

jihadjihad 16 hours ago

It's basically a Latin version of the Greek anthology [0], but far less commonly used. I'd imagine it occupies similar territory to anthology in high-dimensional space, though, so seems reasonable for an LLM to pick it up.

0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anthology

ggsp 15 hours ago

I had no clue about anthology’s etymology. Very cool!

hencq 2 hours ago

Reading this made me realize the Dutch 'bloemlezing' is literally the same word.

epihelix 5 hours ago

Quoting Wikipedia:

> The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work.

There's obviously the scholarly allusion and the literal floral allusion here, so even if it is AI generated it's right on the money in this case :) You would struggle to find a more apt name.

bonzini 16 hours ago

Readme is AI. :/

forgetfulness 15 hours ago

This would have hit harder ten years ago, TeX ornamentation was a beautiful craft in all senses of the word.

This is still pretty neat, but it's just not the same as carrying the tradition of Donald Knuth.

Thomashuet 14 hours ago

Not just the README, all of it. The author gives more details about it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1xixznw/comment/19rv...

bonzini 13 hours ago

I don't mind that as much. Scratching an itch with AI is fine, but if you want to publish it to the world I sort of expect some effort to show why you did that and why I should care.

0x20cowboy 11 hours ago

Why should anyone care if you care?

YeGoblynQueenne 11 hours ago

Why should anyone care, full stop.

russfink 6 hours ago

Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.

bluerooibos 12 hours ago

Nice! I do slightly prefer the implementation/style in the Reddit post - do you have any plans to try and recreate that more closely or add multiple style options to it? Neat either way.

nico 16 hours ago

Very impressed with both the cool idea and visuals, as well as the technical details. Had no idea you could do animations in Latex/PDF. So beautiful! Thank you for sharing

WillAdams 15 hours ago

It was rather more prosaic, but I did put a flipbook typographic animation into the printed version of my article on Zapfino in _TUGboat_

https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf

5555watch 6 hours ago

What are we looking at here?

WillAdams 6 hours ago

Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.

paaloeye 12 hours ago

This one is a stunner! Now I'm thinking about the next level: define a number of classes of procedurally generated patterns and let LLM decide overall sentiment relevance per page and make it somewhat logical across the document.

Rebuild the document a few times, change the temperature, and choose the best.

skyberrys 14 hours ago

I love it!!! I've tried years ago to make something like this, it didn't work out. But it makes me so happy to see that you did it! Great job!

pmkary 6 hours ago

This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!

vessenes 13 hours ago

Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.

coreyp_1 17 hours ago

Quite beautiful.

b19n 16 hours ago

There are (many) times lately where I have become completely disillusioned with software, despise it at work and at home. But then I see something beautiful like this and feel marginally better.

james_marks 15 hours ago

This is beautiful, thank you!

Avicebron 16 hours ago

Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.

fch42 15 hours ago

This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.

aanet 15 hours ago

This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.

bbor 13 hours ago

Am I miffed that something I've tried multiple times with the latest models has been accomplished here so beautifully, and in LUA (!!!) nonetheless? A little! But it's worth it to know that it is indeed possible...

Great work. I doubt you care, but try not to get caught up in the idea that you might have violated someones god-given property rights by making pretty flowers for fun in the margins of PDFs.

RGS1811 15 hours ago

This is gorgeous! Great idea!

LeTeutz 16 hours ago

YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED

WesolyKubeczek 12 hours ago

I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.