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)
watersb 4 hours ago [-]
I've recently spent some time staring at the contents of the MacTeX Distribution.
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 7 hours ago [-]
Why should anyone care if you care?
YeGoblynQueenne 6 hours ago [-]
Why should anyone care, full stop.
forgetfulness 10 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.
whimsicalism 11 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.
epihelix 10 minutes 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.
jihadjihad 11 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.
I had no clue about anthology’s etymology. Very cool!
bluerooibos 7 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.
ClaraForm 10 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
pmkary 2 hours ago [-]
This is what Knuth made TeX for! art!
paaloeye 8 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.
nico 11 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 10 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_
Typing the letters individually in "Zapfino" until at the end, one gets the nifty encircled ligature of it.
skyberrys 9 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!
vessenes 9 hours ago [-]
Nice. I like that different print runs will have different procedurally generated flowers; nice touch.
coreyp_1 12 hours ago [-]
Quite beautiful.
b19n 11 hours 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.
james_marks 11 hours ago [-]
This is beautiful, thank you!
Avicebron 11 hours ago [-]
Definitely taking a closer look at this after work, awesome job.
fch42 10 hours ago [-]
This is beautiful - thanks for sharing.
bbor 8 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.
aanet 10 hours ago [-]
This is so pretty. Thanks for sharing.
RGS1811 11 hours ago [-]
This is gorgeous! Great idea!
LeTeutz 11 hours ago [-]
YES THIS IS WHAT I NEED
WesolyKubeczek 7 hours ago [-]
I don't care that it's vibecoded, it's beautiful.
ligarota 9 hours ago [-]
Now do it in Typst.
Edit: sad that is AI. And that explains why it's in LaTeX
epihelix 15 minutes 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.)
fiforpg 9 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 5 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 2 hours ago [-]
On the other hand - grab the latex source and toss your AI at it to produce a typst version.
Rendered at 04:52:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
(bottom of the readme)
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.
That doesn't sound like someone who doesn't want their idea copied.
This is still pretty neat, but it's just not the same as carrying the tradition of Donald Knuth.
> 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.
0: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anthology
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
Rebuild the document a few times, change the temperature, and choose the best.
https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
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.
Edit: sad that is AI. And that explains why it's in LaTeX
(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.)
I do understand your sentiment, of course.