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Posted by nanna 18 hours ago

Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX(github.com)
277 points | 47 comments
kjraym 1 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 17 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.
lkm0 14 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)

archermarks 14 hours ago||
Gorgeous but the AI text is so grating.
artursapek 13 hours ago|
It's so recognizable lol. All the staccato.
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.

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.
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.

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?
mathisfun123 3 hours ago||
as in the reddit post: "dawg the flowers are pretty and look cool its not that deep"
ClaraForm 14 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

whimsicalism 15 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 15 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 14 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.

bonzini 15 hours ago||
Readme is AI. :/
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 12 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.
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.

russfink 5 hours ago||
Someone - please figure out how to encode messages using this technique.
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.
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