▲Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web(justif.lyall.co)
43 points by lyall 4 days ago | 6 comments
▲svat 51 minutes ago
For OP: I think "Type specimen" should be the default sample text, just to get readers into the right spirit. :)

For anyone else reading this: make sure you click on the "controls & metrics" at the bottom to try out all the options (such as comparing with your browser's "text-wrap: pretty"); it's really cool!

▲svat 4 days ago
This is great! Loved the demo and controls (and nice touch to include The Frog Prince as one of the sample texts lol). I think by doing tracking and expansion you're going even further than original Knuth TeX did/does. Maybe for the demo when hyphenation is turned off, the browser side should also turn it off? Or leave it like this, justif without hyphenation still does better than browser with hyphenation :)

Wish this project great success!

▲lyall 4 days ago
Thank you! And yes by default TeX doesn't do tracking or expansion, but the microtype [0] package does.

And I did struggle a bit with deciding how best to do the comparison to native browser rendering. I wanted it to be an apples-to-apples comparison, but also didn't want to unfairly handicap the browser by disabling something like hyphenation. It's already bad enough as is...

0: https://ctan.org/pkg/microtype

▲airstrike 36 minutes ago
This demo feels about as good as eating a spoonful of tiramisu
▲antics9 1 hour ago
Side-by-side didn’t do it for me but flicker made all the difference!

This is great, wish that browsers would implement a better algorithm.

Also good execution with the demo page.

▲vhwalke 33 minutes ago
[flagged]
▲wrs 1 hour ago
Chromium supposedly implemented Knuth-Plass for CSS's "text-wrap: balance", but reading the end of the tracking bug [0] it seems it stops at six lines? (Design doc: [1])

[0] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40270471 [1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jJFD8nAUuiUX6ArFZQqQo8yT...