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...
today at 9:35 AM
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.
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)
yesterday at 7:06 PM
Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
yesterday at 8:36 PM
It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.
today at 12:34 AM
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.
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.
yesterday at 9:41 PM
> 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.
yesterday at 9:16 PM
Why? I'm sure basically any closed product would prefer that there were no open source copies, but why feel sad for them?
today at 6:02 AM
as in the reddit post: "dawg the flowers are pretty and look cool its not that deep"
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
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.
yesterday at 6:05 PM
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
yesterday at 6:58 PM
I had no clue about anthology’s etymology. Very cool!
today at 7:41 AM
Reading this made me realize the Dutch 'bloemlezing' is literally the same word.
today at 4:42 AM
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.
yesterday at 5:57 PM
Readme is AI. :/
yesterday at 7:27 PM
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...
yesterday at 9:12 PM
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.
yesterday at 10:20 PM
Why should anyone care if you care?
yesterday at 10:46 PM
Why should anyone care, full stop.
yesterday at 6:43 PM
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.
today at 4:01 AM
Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.
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.
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
yesterday at 6:55 PM
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
today at 3:24 AM
What are we looking at here?
today at 3:27 AM
Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.
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.
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!
today at 3:15 AM
This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!
yesterday at 8:22 PM
Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
yesterday at 5:10 PM
Quite beautiful.
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.
yesterday at 6:20 PM
This is beautiful, thank you!
yesterday at 5:57 PM
Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
yesterday at 7:01 PM
This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.
yesterday at 6:35 PM
This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
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.
yesterday at 6:16 PM
This is gorgeous! Great idea!
yesterday at 5:32 PM
YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
yesterday at 10:04 PM
I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
yesterday at 7:54 PM
Now do it in Typst.
Edit: sad that is AI. And that explains why it's in LaTeX
yesterday at 7:58 PM
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.
today at 4:37 AM
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.)
yesterday at 11:34 PM
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.
today at 2:54 AM
On the other hand - grab the latex source and toss your AI at it to produce a typst version.