A garden in the margin: procedurally grown blue flowers drawn purely in LuaLaTeX
anderssandberg · x · 2026-10-30
A lovely excerpt from a piece on procedural ornament: the author grows a cluster of blue morning-glory flowers in the left margin using LuaLaTeX—no images, no imported vector paths, no external programs; every petal becomes PDF path operators written straight into the file.
The document defines primitives and constructions with full rigor: petals sampled from handwritten curve primitives, ink gradations from 25% to 90% by 'altitude', stems grown as spirals with per-notch petal placement, all with exact numeric parameters. Flower is grown, not drawn—a modern Knuthian flourish.
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