Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX

270 points - yesterday at 3:48 PM

Source

Comments

kjraym today at 8:48 AM
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...

lkm0 yesterday at 7:13 PM
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 yesterday at 7:06 PM
Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
watersb today at 12:34 AM
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 yesterday at 8:36 PM
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.
ClaraForm yesterday at 7:05 PM
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 yesterday at 5:58 PM
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.
bonzini yesterday at 5:57 PM
Readme is AI. :/
russfink today at 4:01 AM
Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.
bluerooibos yesterday at 9:42 PM
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 yesterday at 5:58 PM
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
paaloeye yesterday at 9:15 PM
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 yesterday at 7:25 PM
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 today at 3:15 AM
This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!
vessenes yesterday at 8:22 PM
Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
coreyp_1 yesterday at 5:10 PM
Quite beautiful.
b19n yesterday at 5:33 PM
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 yesterday at 6:20 PM
This is beautiful, thank you!
Avicebron yesterday at 5:57 PM
Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
fch42 yesterday at 7:01 PM
This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.
aanet yesterday at 6:35 PM
This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
bbor yesterday at 8:57 PM
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 yesterday at 6:16 PM
This is gorgeous! Great idea!
LeTeutz yesterday at 5:32 PM
YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
WesolyKubeczek yesterday at 10:04 PM
I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
ligarota yesterday at 7:54 PM
Now do it in Typst.

Edit: sad that is AI. And that explains why it's in LaTeX