A 1990s game guide justified by hand: how one author rewrote words to fit

Justifying text in a monospace font has long been one of the most irritating corners of working with plain text, and a post published on August 30 by designer Marcin Wichary on his Unsung blog turns up a remarkable historical workaround: instead of asking software to space the lines, the author rewrote the words themselves until every line ended exactly at the right margin.

A 1990s Super Metroid guide with a razor-straight right edge

The example is rs1n's walkthrough for Super Metroid, written in the late 1990s for GameFAQs. The guide runs for more than 17,000 words, and the right margin of every single line falls exactly on the last letter, with no doubled spaces anywhere. When a reader asked in the FAQ's own question section which justification program had been used, the author answered: "None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor."

Why monospace justification usually breaks down

Wichary walks through the reasons this is hard. Ordinary text in a fixed-width font looks acceptable, and right alignment works as long as the writer is willing to count spaces. Centering already becomes awkward, because there is no half space to even things out. Full justification is the worst case: the spaces grow too large and cannot be distributed evenly, producing an unpleasant texture. Hyphenation — the standard answer in print — is also unattractive in monospace, where hyphens draw attention to themselves and complicate copying and pasting text. That is why fully justified plain-text files are rare.

That leaves rewriting as an option — a technique familiar from print, where editors routinely rework a sentence to avoid widows and orphans. It is far less common in onscreen writing, which is what makes the GameFAQs case worth sharing as a curiosity.

A constraint interface writers still live with

Wichary closes by noting that the discipline is not as alien as it sounds: anyone who has spent an hour trimming a button label or a tooltip so that it fits inside a densely packed interface at a fixed width has done a version of the same thing. Choosing words to fit the space, rather than letting the layout absorb whatever words arrive, is a skill the guide's author applied to tens of thousands of words, by hand, in a text editor.