Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX(github.com)
306 points by nanna 21 hours ago | 48 comments
tl;dr: Florilegium is a LaTeX package that procedurally generates Delft-blue floral page margins, with every petal, leaf, and stem computed as parametric curves in Lua and written directly into the PDF—no images or external assets. It supports decorated initials, flowers at headings, seasonal "aging" across pages, mirrored two-sided layouts, and alternate themes (geometric shapes or mathematical figures), using a greedy space-filling growth loop inspired by Wong, Zongker & Salesin's 1998 ornament paper. A pure PostScript port is also included, letting printers compute each garden at print time.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Appreciation for the beauty and utility of the procedural generation project
  • ↓Criticism of the AI-generated README text accompanying the project
  • •Sharing related procedural drawing projects and TeX ecosystem tools
  • ↓Concern that the project copies work from someone who didn't want it reproduced
  • ↑Interest in extending the technique to new applications like note-taking or steganography