Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX
github.com275 points by nanna 18 hours ago
275 points by nanna 18 hours 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...
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.
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)
Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
I've recently spent some time staring at the contents of the MacTeX Distribution.
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.
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.
> 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.
Why? I'm sure basically any closed product would prefer that there were no open source copies, but why feel sad for them?
as in the reddit post: "dawg the flowers are pretty and look cool its not that deep"
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
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.
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.
I had no clue about anthology’s etymology. Very cool!
Reading this made me realize the Dutch 'bloemlezing' is literally the same word.
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.
Readme is AI. :/
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...
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.
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.
Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.
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.
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
It was rather more prosaic, but I did put a flipbook typographic animation into the printed version of my article on Zapfino in _TUGboat_
What are we looking at here?
Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.
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.
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!
This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!
Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
Quite beautiful.
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.
This is beautiful, thank you!
Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.
This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
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.
This is gorgeous! Great idea!
YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
Now do it in Typst.
Edit: sad that is AI. And that explains why it's in LaTeX
If not for AI, the project would have remained where it was born: in the author's head.
I do understand your sentiment, of course.
Why would AI-generated explain LaTeX? Pretty sure most people still use LaTeX around here.
(I'd never heard of Typst until your post, personally. But I'd guess it would be easy to port over to that platform with an LLM if you wanted to.)
It's LaTeX because the reddit post, inquiring on how to do this and which sparked author to make this project and into which author shared it, was made in the LaTeX sub.
On the other hand - grab the latex source and toss your AI at it to produce a typst version.