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  • this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
    by brooke2k
  • Same here, justified text feels difficult to read. And, I had academia where where students are forced to justify text....
    by cute_boi
  • I guess in printed material it’s more space efficient, which is why it has historically been used. Justified text can be made look nice but it requires hyphenation and a non-greedy linebreaking algorithm, which unfortunately is not implemented in browsers or Microsoft Word.
    by hebrides
  • Fully justified text looks much better when it’s more narrow columns, especially multiple; full page width text is usually not the main use case
    by cheesecakegood
  • People will bend over backwards to rationalize it but the actual explanation is quite simple: 16th-century typesetters saw it as beautiful, and a norm was born.

    IIRC, the somewhat random allocation of trailing silent "e"s in English spelling can partly be explained by typesetters trying to fill lines.

    Totally agree with you BTW. I find justification ugly as sin.

    by bluebarbet
  • It's just neatness. Like ironing clothes or putting on a tie, it's not about it serving a functional purpose. It's just to show off straight lines.
    by jolmg
  • I've never given this much thought, but I agree with you 100%.

    After reading this article I thought "wow that's really impressive and I hate it".

    For the same reasons you mention, and the words seem to "blend together" into a blob of text and losing my interest.

    Still super impressive that people do this though.

    by JeremyMorgan
  • Differences are supposed to convey information. E.g. a paragraph's first line is indented to indicate that this is a start of a paragraph. Differences in line width convey no useful information, so the are suppressed. Same goes for overall text height on a page, although this rule is broken more often.

    Typesetters are known to be very specific about small details. E. g. tables are typeset with meticulous alignment rules. It may look superfluous, but it is not. The nature of the craft is that it has to be invisible unless you know where to look.

    by Mikhail_Edoshin
  • One advantage in print; pages are often not entirely opaque. So on page 3, you see a bit of the text of page 2 shine through. If page 2 has a jagged right margin, this also makes the left margin of page 3 look uneven.

    Meanwhile, the right margin of page 3 looks has a "shadow" that goes all the way to the right because the left margin of page 2 pokes out underneath it - your eye might want to glide to the end of the block, but the sentence stops earlier.

    It looks better when it's aligned, which is also why you can specify a left- and right margin that alternates on odd and even pages.

    This is obviously only a concern for books and papers, and not so much for e.g. glossy magazines.

    by bux93
  • The maintainer of top fully-justifies his commit messages, e.g., https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/e6f22569e9db16d...

    commit e6f22569e9db16dbef7d9bdee5bb41b8cb7a03ca

    Author: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>

    Date: Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 2024 -0500

        top: attempt once again to allow help text translation
    
    Back when our release 4.0.1 was being readied, sources
    were sent to the TP (Translation Project). However one
    person named Benno Schulenberg refused to release them
    for translation. His stated reason was the top command
    line help text which then finally included long forms.
    
    He demanded that the help text be broken into separate
    strings instead of a single large string. But, all the
    top text (some much more complex) has just one string.
    So that stated reason was, at the least, inconsistent.
    
    [ I suspect the real reason was that Mr. Schulenberg ]
    [ thought that the carefully right-justified English ]
    [ wording would also be required of translations too ]
    
    The bottom line was that Benno took it upon himself to
    change the TP motto from "you code, we translate" into
    "first we tell you how to code and then we translate".
    
    Rather than bend a knee to that despot, I disabled the
    text entirely, admittedly denying users a translation.
    Now, with this commit we enable translatable help text
    but with a hint included to ignore the justified text.
    
    Reference)s):
    . Oct, 2022 - finalized translation exclusion
    commit ab05a3785f29cc4b754e17c53bfb3d8ba054563e
    
    Signed-off-by: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
    by benji-york
  • I too feel that fully justified text can be fully justified. I used to use it back when blogs were a thing.
    by 0134340
  • Pretty sure Laravel source code comments above functions were always something like 3 lines, with each line slightly less length than the previous one. Not sure if this is still done or enforced at all, but it was always neat to see.

    Here is an example - https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Connectio... - looks like each one is 3 characters shorter.

    by howToTestFE
  • I think about this all the time. The first several years of Laravel had just absolutely beautiful code to see (both from an engineering, OCD and aesthetic perspective)
    by KerryJones
  • Two definitions that I had to look up.

    * Widow: a short final line of a paragraph that gets stranded at the top of the next page or column.

    * Orphan: a first line of a paragraph stranded at the bottom of a page or column.

    by fhub
  • There are also Rivers - when spaces between words on multiple lines align vertically. Harder to control for than widows and orphans.
    by janci
  • Those who lived through the (text-mode) WordPerfect era may remember 'widow and orphan protection' as being one of the features which was advertised for this program, i.e it could be set to either move that orphaned first line of a new paragraph to the next page or move a few extra lines or a whole paragraph to the next page to keep the widow company.
    by Leonard_of_Q
  • The German is more crass: Hurenkind and Schusterjunge, translates to 'child of a whore' and 'shoemaker boy'. The child of a whore does not know where it comes from (who is their father), the short final line - the shoemaker boy is so poor, he does not know where he will end up (the short first line)

    https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurenkind_und_Schusterjunge

    Edit: Also, LaTeX has specific penalties for those two: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/32116

    by a_bonobo
  • I like the idea that arbitrary constraints can actually improve writing. Without a constraint, it's easy to fall back on familiar phrasing, while having to work around something unusual forces you to reconsider each word. I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.
    by unicorn_platfor
  • In other words you could say constraint is the progenitor of creativity.
    by bregma
  • This is what I think about grammar. Yes, it’s a little arbitrary but it makes you think a little more about your writing. That’s why I try to use correct grammar in text messages. I don’t push this on anyone because most people don’t like to think about word choice, but I am a writer at heart. Still I have to bite my tongue every time someone sends me a text message “hi am here”
    by InfiniteRand
  • Live is short, required time to market is even shorter. Arbitrary constraints might work if you have nothing better to do, but if you have a goal, or specific ideas you want to train, you'll get more natural constraints.
    by dchftcs
  • > I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.

    It does. It’s a know aphorism that constraints bread creativity. A couple of examples (one of deliberate constraints and another of accidental constraints):

    Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt created “Oblique Strategies” as ways to challenge yourself.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

    The Köln Concert, which is “the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album” was improvised because there was a mixup and Keith Jarrett was given a terrible piano.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Köln_Concert

    by latexr
  • suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically

    https://tom7.org/bovex/

    by ivw
  • and in latex too, not just monospace
    by asddubs
  • Which he described as "solving the AI alignment problem".
    by JoshTriplett
  • towards the end of the knuth version

    > This presents a problem for the typical way that academic papers are written, which is to do all the work in a coffee-fueled fugue in the last few days before the deadline, then stay up all night writing the paper and finding citations for the pro-forma “related work” section which you did last but you know that the reviewers will insist upon

    I have zero exposure to academia but chuckled because thats often what I do for blog posts :P

    by hankbond
  • If you're reading this and you're put off by the "uses an LLM", don't be. This is not a low-effort video, quite the opposite. This is one of the best YouTube videos I have ever seen.
    by bla3
  • No mention of Tom7's "Badness 0" by the author is the a crime!
    by ivanjermakov
  • > At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

    I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

    See also: localizing your interface to German

    by gyomu
  • Anyone who ever worked as a front end developer definitely felt this.
    by someguyiguess