Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX
383 points by nanna 6 days ago | 53 comments
  • coreyp_1 6 days ago |
    Quite beautiful.
  • LeTeutz 6 days ago |
    YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
  • b19n 6 days 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.
  • bonzini 6 days ago |
    Readme is AI. :/
    • forgetfulness 6 days 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.

      • amoshebb 5 days ago |
        I don’t see it as so different. Knuth was playing with bleeding edge tools to see how they could make beautiful documents, I’m sure peers told him plenty of times trying to run vector graphics through a PDP-10 wasn’t “carrying the tradition of…”

        Knuth today is busy writing “Shock! Shock! Claude Opus is great at math” papers, not poo-pooing other with strange appeals to “tradition”

    • Thomashuet 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days ago |
          Why should anyone care if you care?
          • YeGoblynQueenne 6 days ago |
            Why should anyone care, full stop.
  • Avicebron 6 days ago |
    Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
  • nico 6 days 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 6 days 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 5 days ago |
        What are we looking at here?
        • WillAdams 5 days ago |
          Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.
  • whimsicalism 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days ago |
        I had no clue about anthology’s etymology. Very cool!
        • hencq 5 days ago |
          Reading this made me realize the Dutch 'bloemlezing' is literally the same word.
          • ggsp 5 days ago |
            Very cool, thank you for sharing that :) I got curious, funny how every single Wikipedia article for languages which use the Latin script is some cognate of “anthology”, including for “outsiders” (excuse the term) such as Finnish, Basque, or Hungarian, while the Dutch (and the Romans obviously) translated it.
    • epihelix 5 days 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.

      • whimsicalism 5 days ago |
        definitely! my project was also flower related
  • RGS1811 6 days ago |
    This is gorgeous! Great idea!
  • james_marks 6 days ago |
    This is beautiful, thank you!
  • aanet 6 days ago |
    This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
  • fch42 6 days ago |
    This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.
  • ClaraForm 6 days 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

  • archermarks 6 days ago |
    Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
    • artursapek 6 days ago |
      It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.
  • lkm0 6 days 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)

  • skyberrys 6 days 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!
  • vessenes 6 days ago |
    Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
  • scott_codie 6 days 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 6 days 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 6 days 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 5 days ago |
      as in the reddit post: "dawg the flowers are pretty and look cool its not that deep"
    • tliltocatl 5 days ago |
      If you don't want it to be copied, don't show it to anyone never ever.
  • bbor 6 days 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.

  • paaloeye 6 days 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.

  • bluerooibos 6 days 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.
  • WesolyKubeczek 6 days ago |
    I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
  • watersb 6 days 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.

  • pmkary 5 days ago |
    This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!
  • russfink 5 days ago |
    Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.
  • kjraym 5 days 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 5 days 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.
      • kjraym 5 days ago |
        I think you mean this isn't what the OP was looking for? If not, I'm not sure what you mean, but I wasn't trying to compete with the OP's photo. Thanks for the feedback.
  • Thomashuet 5 days ago |
    Another implementation of the same idea which I think looks even better: https://flora.alpacasoft.dev/
  • jonathaneunice 5 days ago |
    Quite beautiful.

    Feels useful for watermarks that are pleasant to look at.