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.
I don’t see it as so different. Knuth was playing with bleeding edge tools to see how they could make beautiful documents, I’m sure peers told him plenty of times trying to run vector graphics through a PDP-10 wasn’t “carrying the tradition of…”
Knuth today is busy writing “Shock! Shock! Claude Opus is great at math” papers, not poo-pooing other with strange appeals to “tradition”
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] threadThis is still pretty neat, but it's just not the same as carrying the tradition of Donald Knuth.
Knuth today is busy writing “Shock! Shock! Claude Opus is great at math” papers, not poo-pooing other with strange appeals to “tradition”
https://tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb24-2/tb77adams.pdf
> 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.
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
(bottom of the readme)
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.)
That doesn't sound like someone who doesn't want their idea copied.
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.
Rebuild the document a few times, change the temperature, and choose the best.
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.