Creating beautiful ornaments

Especially in older books, we find typographic ornaments such as calligraphic flowers. In this recipe, we will create a greeting card with such ornaments.

Getting ready

We will use the pgfornament package written by Alain Matthes and based on designs by Vincent Le Moign and Chennan Zhang. At the time of writing, it contains 196 high-quality vintage ornaments. It’s included with TeX Live and MiKTeX; ensure you have it installed.

How to do it...

We will use a KOMA-Script class because of its arbitrary base font size. The calligra package made by Gerd Neugebauer provides a font with a hand-written style:

1. Load the document class, set paper and text dimensions, and choose a page style without the printed page number:

   \documentclass[paper=a6,landscape,
                  fontsize=30pt]{scrartcl}
   \areaset{0.9\paperwidth}{0.68\paperheight}
   \pagestyle{empty}

2. Activate...