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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.

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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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