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Comment by xavdid | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if the devs are here, but please don't justify your text! It makes the lines all have huge spaces in the middle. It's much harder to read as a result.

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Man I said this years ago and was overruled. Many your comment will help convince them!

The text justification would look a lot better with CSS "hyphens: auto".

Don't listen to this. Justified text is much much easier to read.

When done properly (i.e. in LaTeX with microtype, with good line breaking algorithm and character expansion) justified text is easier to read. The web is not that.

Honestly I've just set up a user CSS sheet that forces left justify. It makes the internet more comfortable, and has practically no downsides / bad interactions, unlike many such overrides.

rivers, contextual word splits, compound noun splits, awkward pauses, there is so many downsides to mindless text justification. Only editorialised and hand crafted justified text is nice. Everything else ends up forceful and ugly.

Strange that online it fell out of favor, because text justification was the default for centuries. It's still around in most PDFs though, e.g. in research papers.

When there was a person physically typesetting every line, the justification wasn't generally "mindless"

I suspect the print typesetting has largely been automatized for several decades.

Is there a difference between the rules TeX uses and HTML renderers?

AIUI, yes, most browsers use greedy line breaking by default. E.g., FF does not do Knuth style[1].

This led to the CSS `text-wrap` property, and `text-wrap: pretty`[2], but pretty is not supported in FF yet, and the value `pretty` doesn't mandate Knuth's algorithm.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

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