Decorate Documents With Ornaments

Aan Triono included in category LaTeX

2025-12-14 2026-08-08 433 words 2 minutes

Contents

Decorating Documents with LaTeX Ornaments

Invitation cards, greeting cards, certificates, and title pages often look better when the text is framed with decorative ornaments. In LaTeX, this can be done with ornament packages such as pgfornament.

Here is one example.

In this article we will build two styles:

ornaments only in the page corners
ornaments around the full page border

Ornaments in the Page Corners

In the first example, ornaments are placed only in the four corners.

Prepare the document class and required packages first.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[dvipsnames]{xcolor}
\usepackage{tikzrput}
\usepackage{pgfornament}

Then start the drawing in the document body.

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}[color=Maroon,
every node/.style={inner sep=0pt}]
...
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

Here the ornament color is Maroon. To make positioning easier, create a square guide and grid lines first.

\draw[ultra thick] (-6,-6) rectangle (6,6);
\draw[help lines] (-6,-6) grid (6,6);

The four corner ornaments can be placed like this:

Top right:

\node[anchor=north east] at (vecbox.north east)
  {\pgfornament[width=5cm,symmetry=v]{61}};

Top left:

\node[anchor=north west] at (vecbox.north west)
  {\pgfornament[width=5cm]{61}};

Bottom left:

\node[anchor=south west] at (vecbox.south west)
  {\pgfornament[width=5cm,symmetry=h]{61}};

Bottom right:

\node[anchor=south east] at (vecbox.south east)
  {\pgfornament[width=5cm,symmetry=c]{61}};

If you want to place text inside the frame, use commands like these.

\rput (0,1){\textcolor{blue}{\huge Insert text here}};
\rput (0,0){\textcolor{blue}{\Large Or here}};

The coordinates inside the parentheses control the position on the x and y axes. Once the layout is correct, the guide lines can be removed from the final version.

The result looks like this.

Ornaments Around the Full Page Border

After placing ornaments in the corners, you can continue by filling the middle sections of the border as well.

In this example:

the corner ornament uses code 63
the middle border ornament uses code 46

Top center:

\node[anchor=north] at (vecbox.north)
  {\pgfornament[width=7cm,symmetry=h]{46}};

Left center, rotated vertically:

\node[anchor=north,rotate=90] at (vecbox.west)
  {\pgfornament[width=7cm,symmetry=h]{46}};

Bottom center:

\node[anchor=south] at (vecbox.south)
  {\pgfornament[width=7cm]{46}};

Right center:

\node[anchor=north,rotate=-90] at (vecbox.east)
  {\pgfornament[width=7cm,symmetry=h]{46}};

You can also add ornaments inside the page, not only along the border. For example, the following commands place a title and two animal ornaments:

\rput (0,3.3){\textcolor{Red}{\Large A lion chases a goat}};
\rput (-2,1.7) {\pgfornament[width=3.5cm]{158}};
\rput (3,1.7) {\pgfornament[width=2.5cm]{104}};

And these commands add plant ornaments:

\rput (0,-1.5) {\pgfornament[width=2.5cm]{10}};
\rput (2,-2.3) {\pgfornament[width=1cm]{10}};
\rput (-2,-2.3) {\pgfornament[width=1cm]{10}};

Their positions can be adjusted simply by changing the coordinates.

The final result looks like this.

Besides animal and plant ornaments, the pgfornament package also includes many other decorative elements. You can browse them in the official CTAN documentation: CTAN pgfornament.

Closing

With pgfornament, you can make LaTeX documents look much more decorative for greeting cards, invitations, certificates, or title pages. The main work is choosing the ornament code, size, and position carefully.