"I just chose words carefully."
This post highlights an astonishing 1990s Super Metroid guide where the author manually justified 17,000 words of monospace text by meticulously selecting words to perfectly fit each line, eliminating extra spaces and hyphens. Hacker News readers are captivated by this almost unbelievable dedication, sparking discussions on the intersection of human ingenuity, obsessive attention to detail, and the potential for AI to replicate such tasks. It's a reminder of creative constraints and the unexpected ways people push boundaries, even for something as mundane as text layout.
The Lowdown
The article unearths a remarkable relic from the late 1990s: a Super Metroid guide by "rs1n" where the entire 17,000-word text is perfectly justified in monospace. This wasn't achieved through advanced typesetting software, but by the author's painstaking manual word selection to ensure every line precisely filled its width without awkward double spaces or distracting hyphens.
- The author, Marcin Wichary, first illustrates the common difficulties of monospace justification (uneven spacing, intrusive hyphens).
- He then presents a screenshot from rs1n's Super Metroid guide, demonstrating perfectly aligned right margins with no visual imperfections.
- rs1n confirmed in the guide's FAQ that "no program" was used, stating, "I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up."
- Wichary notes this is a curiosity, relating it to the minor rewrites done in traditional publishing to avoid widows and orphans, and to developers' experiences fitting UI strings.
This seemingly mundane detail reveals an extraordinary level of dedication and craft, pushing the boundaries of what's considered feasible for manual text manipulation, long before automated tools could even dream of such precision.
The Gossip
Awe and Algorithmic Anticipation
Commenters are universally stunned by the author's meticulous, manual effort, expressing a mix of deep admiration and a touch of horror at the sheer dedication. This astonishment quickly pivots to discussions about how modern AI could now automate such a task, with one commenter highlighting Tom7's "Badness 0" project as a real-world example of an LLM achieving similar "perfect" text justification.
Typographical Tangles & Tales
Beyond the initial shock, the discussion extends to similar personal and professional experiences with constrained text layouts. Users share anecdotes about manually fitting text in commit messages, UI elements, or tooltips. The topic also broadens to professional typesetting concepts like avoiding "widows and orphans," with one commenter recalling how X-Files creator Chris Carter would tailor dialogue to satisfy similar layout preferences in scripts.