alt.hn

7/17/2026 at 12:47:20 PM

Show HN: Justif – Knuth-Plass justification and microtypography for the web

 https://justif.lyall.co/

by lyall

7/21/2026 at 9:52:59 PM

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!

by svat

7/17/2026 at 1:21:16 PM

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!

by svat

7/17/2026 at 1:37:55 PM

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

by lyall

7/21/2026 at 10:07:36 PM

This demo feels about as good as eating a spoonful of tiramisu

by airstrike

7/21/2026 at 9:04:44 PM

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.

by antics9

7/21/2026 at 10:10:34 PM

[flagged]

by vhwalke