Vintage scientific papers with LaTeX

Twenty small examples show independent mechanisms behind a convincing old-scientific-paper aesthetic. Each file is deliberately standalone: copy one, compile it, and remove individual effects to see what they contribute.

The examples fall into three groups: pure LaTeX pages (1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10 to 14), standalone fiziko MetaPost figures (3, 7, 8, 9), and LaTeX pages with fiziko figures drawn inside them by LuaTeX's built-in MetaPost (15 to 20).

Gallery

Low-resolution previews of the compiled output; the PDFs themselves are vector and searchable.

The examples

1. 01-early-modern-page.tex -- OpenType old-style figures and historical ligatures, an explicit long s, warm paper and ink colors, asymmetric margins, a drop capital, spaced small capitals, marginalia, and printer's rules.
2. 02-engraved-optics-plate.tex -- deterministic irregular strokes and line hatching in TikZ, with labels kept as real searchable text.
3. 03-fiziko-hooke-apparatus.mp -- a compact Hooke apparatus drawn with the external fiziko MetaPost library: hatched support, modeled spring, hanging weight, and measured extension.
4. 04-ornamented-incipit.tex -- an A5 early-scientific title page with a boxed three-line initial and a small vector ornament made from ordinary TikZ paths.
5. 05-victorian-newspaper.tex -- a compact square broadsheet with a masthead, balanced columns, rule between columns, pull quotation, article heads, and meteorological register.
6. 06-natural-history-catalogue.tex -- a museum catalogue page using hanging entries, dot leaders, explicit typographic roles, and old-style numeric data.
7. 07-fiziko-lens-rays.mp -- a glass lens whose ray paths are computed by fiziko's refraction macro rather than drawn to a predetermined focal point.
8. 08-fiziko-atwood-machine.mp -- an Atwood machine composed from a hatched support, shaded pulley, curved rope, hanging weights, and acceleration arrow.
9. 09-fiziko-shading-atlas.mp -- a side-by-side comparison of line shading, stippling, and a variable-width shaded tube.
10. 10-lua-table-of-logarithms.tex -- a five-place table of logarithms whose every digit is computed by a Lua function at compile time, set in lining tabular figures with the ruling of a nineteenth-century table.
11. 11-circumpolar-star-chart.tex -- a polar star chart: one macro converts right ascension and declination to chart coordinates for thirty-four catalogued stars, hour circles lettered in roman numerals, and magnitude-graded discs.
12. 12-snow-crystal-micrographs.tex -- four circular microscope fields; the crystals are grown by TikZ Lindenmayer-system grammars, with six rotated copies of one arm supplying the hexagonal symmetry.
13. 13-cooling-curve-graph-paper.tex -- a pgfplots chart on sepia graph paper with inward ticks, open-circle plotting symbols, a hand-fitted curve, and an italic marginal remark.
14. 14-patent-drawing-sheet.tex -- a patent-office plate of a centrifugal governor: numbered leader lines, sections hatched at forty-five degrees, engraved balls, and witness and inventor signature lines.
15. 15-fiziko-inclined-plane.tex -- a treatise page whose figure is drawn by fiziko inside LuaLaTeX: a wooden wedge, a shaded ball, and the weight resolved along and normal to the slope, with labels set in the page's own text and math fonts.
16. 16-fiziko-telescope-plate.tex -- a Keplerian telescope in which every ray is refracted by fiziko's tracing macro; the focus and the exit pupil, where the eye is placed, are found where computed rays cross the axis.
17. 17-fiziko-terrestrial-globe.tex -- the earth from three stations using fiziko's globe with its built-in coastlines, plus a border row of small globes turned by equal steps.
18. 18-fiziko-mechanics-primer.tex -- a two-column chapter with a loaded cart, a lever in balance, and a pendulum, each drawn in place in its column.
19. 19-fiziko-knots-plate.tex -- trefoil, cinquefoil, and septafoil cords from one formula each, with fiziko finding the crossings and shading the rope.
20. 20-fiziko-phases-of-the-moon.tex -- the moon in eight orbital positions under one fixed light, and the same eight phases as seen from the earth by turning the light about a fixed sphere.

The .tex files compile independently with LuaLaTeX. The .mp files are standalone MetaPost sources with fiziko as an explicit external dependency. Examples 15 to 20 need both: they are LuaLaTeX documents that load fiziko through luamplib.

Build

The quickest route is the script for your shell, run from the repository root. Both compile every example into build/ and skip the fiziko examples unless a fiziko checkout is given:

.\build.ps1 -Fiziko ..\fiziko            # PowerShell 7

./build.sh ../fiziko                      # POSIX shell

Append example names to build only those. The sections below spell out the same commands by hand.

Requirements:

• LuaLaTeX (TeX Live or MiKTeX);
• the LaTeX packages fontspec, geometry, microtype, multicol, xcolor, tikz (with its lindenmayersystems, patterns.meta, calc, and shapes.geometric libraries), pgfplots, luacode, and array;
• EB Garamond (the ebgaramond package in TeX Live and MiKTeX).

From the repository root, create an output directory and compile all pure-LaTeX examples:

# PowerShell 7 on Windows
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force build | Out-Null
$names = @(
  '01-early-modern-page',
  '02-engraved-optics-plate',
  '04-ornamented-incipit',
  '05-victorian-newspaper',
  '06-natural-history-catalogue',
  '10-lua-table-of-logarithms',
  '11-circumpolar-star-chart',
  '12-snow-crystal-micrographs',
  '13-cooling-curve-graph-paper',
  '14-patent-drawing-sheet'
)
foreach ($name in $names) {
  lualatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error `
    -output-directory=build "examples/$name.tex"
}

# POSIX shell on Linux or macOS
mkdir -p build
for name in \
  01-early-modern-page \
  02-engraved-optics-plate \
  04-ornamented-incipit \
  05-victorian-newspaper \
  06-natural-history-catalogue \
  10-lua-table-of-logarithms \
  11-circumpolar-star-chart \
  12-snow-crystal-micrographs \
  13-cooling-curve-graph-paper \
  14-patent-drawing-sheet
do
  lualatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error \
    -output-directory=build "examples/$name.tex"
done

The source files intentionally reject pdfLaTeX. That engine cannot provide the OpenType controls demonstrated here.

Build the fiziko examples

Clone fiziko separately; it is not vendored or relicensed here:

git clone https://github.com/jemmybutton/fiziko.git ../fiziko

MetaPost finds fiziko.mp through MPINPUTS. Preserve the trailing path separator so the normal MetaPost search path remains available.

# PowerShell 7 on Windows
$env:MPINPUTS = "$((Resolve-Path ../fiziko).Path);"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force build | Out-Null
$names = @(
  '03-fiziko-hooke-apparatus',
  '07-fiziko-lens-rays',
  '08-fiziko-atwood-machine',
  '09-fiziko-shading-atlas'
)
foreach ($name in $names) {
  # -job-name is required by MiKTeX's mpost; omit it on TeX Live (see below).
  mpost -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error `
    -job-name=$name -output-directory=build "examples/$name.mp"
}

# POSIX shell on Linux or macOS
export MPINPUTS="$(cd ../fiziko && pwd):"
mkdir -p build
for name in \
  03-fiziko-hooke-apparatus \
  07-fiziko-lens-rays \
  08-fiziko-atwood-machine \
  09-fiziko-shading-atlas
do
  # Run from inside build/: TeX Live's mpost cannot read the mpx file its
  # btex step writes when -output-directory is used.
  (cd build && mpost -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error \
    "../examples/$name.mp")
done

Each result is named build/<example-name>-1.eps. The two distributions disagree about the job-name flag: MiKTeX's mpost (3.00, checked September 2026) crashes with an access violation at the first btex label unless -job-name=<name> is given, while TeX Live's mpost rejects that spelling and needs no flag at all because the job name defaults to the file's basename. build.ps1 detects MiKTeX and adds the flag; build.sh never does. Convert the EPS files to PDF or PNG with Ghostscript; do not request PDF directly from MetaPost without checking the file signature. Every source uses prologues := 3 so labels are embedded and the output carries an EPSF header.

Build the LaTeX pages with fiziko inside them

Examples 15 to 20 additionally need:

• the luamplib package, which runs MetaPost inside LuaTeX;
• unicode-math and the garamond-math package, so that the mathematical labels on the figures match EB Garamond.

luamplib finds fiziko.mp through the same MPINPUTS variable as above, so set it before running LuaLaTeX:

# PowerShell 7 on Windows
$env:MPINPUTS = "$((Resolve-Path ../fiziko).Path);"
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force build | Out-Null
$names = @(
  '15-fiziko-inclined-plane',
  '16-fiziko-telescope-plate',
  '17-fiziko-terrestrial-globe',
  '18-fiziko-mechanics-primer',
  '19-fiziko-knots-plate',
  '20-fiziko-phases-of-the-moon'
)
foreach ($name in $names) {
  lualatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error `
    -output-directory=build "examples/$name.tex"
}

# POSIX shell on Linux or macOS
export MPINPUTS="$(cd ../fiziko && pwd):"
mkdir -p build
for name in \
  15-fiziko-inclined-plane \
  16-fiziko-telescope-plate \
  17-fiziko-terrestrial-globe \
  18-fiziko-mechanics-primer \
  19-fiziko-knots-plate \
  20-fiziko-phases-of-the-moon
do
  lualatex -interaction=nonstopmode -halt-on-error \
    -output-directory=build "examples/$name.tex"
done

These pages share one pattern. \everymplib inputs fiziko.mp, fixes the random seed, sets the stroke width and light direction, and tints all strokes with the page's ink colour through drawoptions; each figure is then an ordinary mplibcode environment placed where it belongs in the text. Labels written between btex and etex are typeset by the document itself, which is why they appear in EB Garamond and Garamond Math rather than Computer Modern.

Two pitfalls met while writing them:

• MetaPost's default scaled arithmetic rejects randomseed values of 4096 or more, so the seeds in these files are small.
• Do not name a MetaPost variable floor: it shadows the floor function, and fiziko's wood texture then fails with an "Isolated expression" error.

MiKTeX note: the MiKTeX package luamplib (2.42.8, checked September 2026) ships luamplib.sty but not the luamplib.lua module it requires, so \usepackage{luamplib} fails with "module 'luamplib' not found". The fix is to extract both files from the CTAN luamplib.dtx with luatex luamplib.dtx and place them together in a TEXMF root, then refresh the file name database. TeX Live is not affected.

What was corrected from the design discussion

These examples were developed from a Gemini design discussion supplied by the project owner. The useful ideas survived, but its sample was not copied as-is:

• Style=Historic is not used as a generic switch. Historical ligatures are requested explicitly with Ligatures=Historic.
• A long s is an orthographic character, not itself a ligature. The source contains ſ explicitly in obſerved; EB Garamond's Historic feature also substitutes long-s forms in some other contexts.
• \pagecolor already comes from xcolor; a separate pagecolor dependency is unnecessary for this use.
• The discussion used \caption* without loading a package that defines it. The figure MWE uses an ordinary centered text line instead.
• TikZ's random-step decoration is seeded, so recompiling does not redraw the plate differently.

Design notes

This is a period-inspired visual treatment, not a historically exact facsimile. Real seventeenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century publications differ substantially by press, date, language, paper, and reproduction process.

• Swap EB Garamond for another period-specific OpenType face such as IM FELL English or Old Standard when the target publication calls for it. Recheck the replacement font's OpenType features rather than assuming the same settings are supported.
• Old-style figures are a design choice, not a universal historical rule.
• Warm page color and softened ink simulate a scanned or aged copy; a pristine original would not necessarily have those colors.
• Line jitter suggests a handmade plate, while hatching reflects a real graphic constraint of monochrome reproduction. Neither reproduces a particular engraving process by itself.
• Every fiziko example sets a fixed randomseed, because several of the library's textures use random sampling and would otherwise change on rebuild.
• The star positions in example 11 are rounded epoch-2000 coordinates; the cooling readings in example 13 are a formula with a deterministic ripple, not measurements; the lens radii in example 16 were chosen for a legible plate, not copied from an instrument; and the log table in example 10 is computed, so it is exact to the precision printed.
• The knot routine in fiziko is documented by its author as not especially stable. Example 19 uses cords whose crossings are well separated; a new knot may need its sampling step or rope width adjusted.

For accessible output, keep body text contrast high, retain all diagram labels as text, and do not rasterize the final PDF.

License

The source, prose, and generated examples are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. When adapting the project, credit it, link back to the repository, note your changes, and use the same license for the adaptation.

fiziko itself is not included in this repository. It remains a separate GPL-3.0 dependency under the terms published by its upstream project.