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vhwalketoday at 10:10 PM0 repliesview on HN

Wow! I've spent the past few weeks setting 18th-century newspaper text on the web - justified, up to three narrow columns, period ligature, and the gap between CSS justification and real typesetting was a big part of the whole project. The browser's greedy line breaker plus hyphens: auto gets you maybe 80% there, and the last 20% is rivers, loose lines, and archaic words the hyphenation dictionaries have never met. "Fœderal" produces some genuinely creative break points. The result I got to I feel like is good, but not great.

Questions, from someone who wants this to work:

* Does Justif do its own hyphenation (Liang patterns?) or lean on the browser's? And is there a way to feed it exceptions for unusual or archaic spellings?

* How does it behave at narrow measures, say 35–40ch columns? That's where Knuth-Plass should shine most, but it's also where badness compounds fastest.

* What's the reflow cost on long documents (5–10k words) when the container resizes or the user scales the text — full re-run or incremental?

* Any thoughts on coexisting with text-wrap: pretty as browsers slowly grow real paragraph-level breaking?

Congrats on shipping this. I miss producing documents with TeX!