justif

Wanted to have a better reading experience. Curated feeds to avoid bumping into paywalls. Used: https://github.com/chenglou/pretext and: https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif for layout and justification with 2-column pages. Simplified navigation with shortcuts (in Settings) to move through things more quickly. Mainly focused on desktop experience.

Aggregated links to paywall-free news articles because reading news was getting frustrating. Uses filter list of known paywall sites. Checks page for isAccessibleForFree. Looks for paywall vendor script signatures Fetches hourly on my Macbook using RSS, HN Algolia API, Guardian API. Dedupes with nomic on Ollama. JSON edition is here: https://freepress.today/api/edition.json Astro front-end. Use justif and pretext for better typesetting and masonry columns https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif https://github.com/chenglou/pretext About 6 hours on Claude Code in two sessions.

Yes! Just added support for them today after another HN user’s request: https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif/issues/3

Hyphenation: yes, justif does its own hyphenation. It ships with TeX’s hyphenation dictionaries for a bunch of languages, but supports custom dictionaries as well! See https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif#hyphenation Narrow columns: open up the controls on the demo and try adjusting the width slider :) Long documents: try the “Alice in Wonderland (long)” sample text in the demo to get a feel for how it handles long documents. In general it performs well enough I think, though Safari is a little slower than other platforms. It doesn’t do it incrementally (not sure that’s possible), but I spent quite a while trying to make sure it was fast enough to re-layout in real time even on long documents. I haven’t thought about coexisting. I’m not sure how that could work but I’m open to ideas.

Justif is a drop-in JavaScript library that progressively enhances web pages to TeX-level text justification. Installation is a single <script> line, standard text and accessibility affordances are unchanged, and users with JS disabled get native browser rendering. I made justif because I've long been a fan of justified text. I think it looks clean and elegant, and makes reading more enjoyable. But bad justification is the opposite, with gaping spaces that distract me to the point of making the text near unreadable. Browsers have got better recently at handling justified text [0][1], but still use suboptimal greedy algorithms for the most part, and are not near that TeX/InDesign level of quality that I crave. `text-wrap: pretty` exists but is far from a panacea, as you can see for yourself in the demo. Justif also has the benefit of provi