I Just Chose Words Carefully (Unsung)

Marcin Wichary's short post on his blog Unsung starts with why monospace text resists anything but left alignment i-just-chose-words-carefully. Right alignment works if you are willing to count spaces. Centering can't be exact, because there is no half space to split an odd remainder. Full justification is worst: each added gap is a whole character wide and can't be spread evenly, so lines fill up with visible double spaces. Hyphenation, the usual fix in proportional type, draws attention to itself in monospace and breaks copy and paste. That is why plain text files are so rarely justified.

The remaining option is to change the words instead of the spacing. The author known as rs1n did that in a late-1990s GameFAQs guide to Super Metroid: every line ends flush on a letter, with no doubled spaces, for roughly 17,000 words. The guide's own FAQ answers the obvious question: "None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor."

Wichary shares it mostly as a curiosity. Book typesetters do rewrite text to avoid widows and orphans, but on screens it is rare. The modern case most people will recognize is smaller: rewording a button label or a tooltip for hours until it fits a fixed width in a dense interface, which is the same trade of wording for layout.

The vault's other typography pages are typesetinthefuture-blog and fonts-in-use.