Four L-system fractals in LaTeX | Hacker News Reader

Four L-system fractals in LaTeX

overleaf.com

You just have to expect your users to do these kinds of things when giving them a Turing-complete document formatting language :)

Reminds me of this postscript-rendered mandelbrot fractal:

  https://stech.muecke.pw/~spock/mandelbr.ps

Never tried to run this natively on a postscript-printer, though.

Either it or another similar one was floating around my university back in the late 90s. The IT department started sending round emails asking people not to run it on the elderly Lasyjet IIIs; the results looked great but would block the print queue for about three hours.

That annecdote just perfectly describes the pandora's box of turing-complete document formatting languages: Ultimately, you will be faced with the undecidability of the Halting Problem [1] :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem

I feel the same everytime I load a "modern" javascript based webpage. Makes me understand that static data is predictable, aims at linear while anything to liberating gives up on that trait.

if anyone wants an overleaf invite (let's you - and me - get some more storage space) sign-up via this link: https://www.overleaf.com/signup?ref=64cf3f9ff138

The online latex editor is very cool, but the more powerful piece is the direct submission to many journals, ability to sync with git, and all the pre-existing templates.

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