Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX

280 points by nanna 18 hours ago on hackernews | 47 comments

Quite beautiful.

YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED

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 | 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.

Avicebron | 16 hours ago

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

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.

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.

RGS1811 | 15 hours ago

This is gorgeous! Great idea!

james_marks | 15 hours ago

This is beautiful, thank you!

aanet | 15 hours ago

This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.

fch42 | 15 hours ago

This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.

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

archermarks | 15 hours ago

Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.

: artursapek | 13 hours ago
It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.

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)

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!

ligarota | 14 hours ago

Now do it in Typst.

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

: fiforpg | 14 hours ago
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.
: forgotpwd16 | 10 hours ago
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.
: loloquwowndueo | 7 hours ago
On the other hand - grab the latex source and toss your AI at it to produce a typst version.
: epihelix | 5 hours ago
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.)

vessenes | 13 hours ago

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

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"

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.

paaloeye | 13 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.

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.

WesolyKubeczek | 12 hours ago

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

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.

pmkary | 6 hours ago

This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!

russfink | 6 hours ago

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

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 | 39 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.