tex-linebreak

If you enjoyed this you'll probably also enjoy "The Games People Play With Cash Flow" [0] And for the classic HN comment about the site itself: I think it looks very nice, but the native justification algorithm is not very good (especially with hyphenation turned off) so it ends up looking quite sparse at parts on mobile and is a bit jarring to read. I'm a big fan of this implementation [1] of the TeX linebreak algorithm for the web, and think it would make this site look even better with minimal effort. [0] https://commoncog.com/cash-flow-games/ [1] https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak

This is excellent, thank you! I hadn't heard of "balance" before either, so definitely going to experiment with that now too. Anything that can improve typography on the web, even a little bit is a big win in my opinion. I'm also stealing that 1lh tip they link to! If you like this and are interested in something closer to TeX, why not the TeX algorithm itself!? There's this lovely package that works wonderfully on the web https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak?tab=readme-ov-... And if you want to play around with a live example to check the performance, I use it on my site's about page: https://lynkmi.com/about Been on a big LaTeX buzz recently and even added support for it in comments there too!

Don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone suggest setting text-justify. It’s one of those properties that I could imagine having been used in anger and with cause (justifiedly :P) less than a hundred times in total, though the true number is probably higher than that. Anyway, in this case it won’t change anything, because the text is English, and the default value of auto will be equivalent to inter-word. (If the text was Japanese, it would actively harm things, because auto would be equivalent to inter-character, and you’d mess that up.) Anyway, in all current browsers, `text-align: justify` does greedy text layout, where it fits as many words in each line as it can before wrapping. This is technically trivial, but visually inferior to Knuth-Plass line breaking, which tries to find the most visually-pleasing place to break lines. Look at the scr

If you open most books on the shelf you will notice that text is not left-aligned, but is in fact justified to create a consistent vertical margin on the right-hand side[0]. It's the big thing I always miss when I try reading on the web. One way to do this is with JavaScript implementations of the LaTeX hyphenation/justification algorithm. Check out [1] and [2] for examples. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/65ICUVW.png [1]: https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak [2]: https://github.com/bramstein/typeset

The problem is that CSS uses greedy line breaks. In theory, this should improve once browsers implement CSS Text Module Level 4, specifically the `pretty` value for the `text-wrap` property [1][2]. Until then, we're stuck with poor-quality typesetting, or JavaScript solutions [3]. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/css-text-4/#text-wrap [2] https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/672 [3] https://github.com/robertknight/tex-linebreak