Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web
justif.lyall.coJustif 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 providing more consistent text layout across browsers. Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari) all justify text differently, so normally what the user sees depends on what browser they use.
Take a look at the demo, play around with it, see if you can break anything. I'm open to improvements of the API design as well, so please let me know your thoughts.
For more details, see the README: https://github.com/lyallcooper/justif
0: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/justified-text-better-than-expe...
1: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-proportional-web/ 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! 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...