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)
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?
Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.
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.
Why should anyone care if you care?
Why should anyone care, full stop.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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_
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!
Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
Quite beautiful.
This is beautiful, thank you!
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.
Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
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 beautiful - thanks for sharing.
This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
This is gorgeous! Great idea!
I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
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.
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.