Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX
Developer releases tool that generates unique Delft-blue floral page margins procedurally in LaTeX, with no images or external assets.
What to know
- Florilegium generates unique floral page margins in LaTeX using procedural algorithms written in Lua, with no external images or assets—every element is computed and rendered in real time.
- The tool includes procedural variations: different seeds produce different gardens, seasonal settings change what grows, and optional visitors (butterflies, bees, birds, snails) populate the margins.
- The implementation uses hand-authored parametric primitives with randomized parameters and applies a 1998 ornament-filling algorithm to grow flowers into unused page space, then records the sequence as a growth animation.
“The whole palette comes from one color, ink: Delft blue, sepia, green, crimson, violet, teal. The ramp from the darkest stroke to the palest wash is computed from that hue in OKLCH, so the light end never turns gray.”
Kevin Raymond, Developer · GitHub repository description
Kevin Raymond Developer
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage articlesposts
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Bluesky user calls project "delightful"
The project gains early appreciation on social platforms, with users sharing the GitHub repository link and responding positively to the ornamental design approach.
“This is just delightful.”
— arenamontanus.bsky.social -
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…
2 more of the top 3 · 9 posts in this stretch
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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-MetapostProcedural drawing with Lua is lovely. MetaPost provides another drawing language that might be considered more…
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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…
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background
Kevin Raymond releases Florilegium procedural flower tool — Raymond publishes Florilegium, a LuaLaTeX package that generates unique Delft-blue floral page margins procedurally. Every petal, leaf, and stem is computed in Lua as a parametric curve during page layout, painted like watercolor, and written directly into the PDF without external images or assets.
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2 outlets Florilegium: Procedural Flowers in LaTeX
first by HN Best, 13d ago · also HN Frontpage
What people are saying 5 voices from 1 site · best of 9 · verbatim
- Oct 30
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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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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.
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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)
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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]
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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.