The developer who justified 17,000 words of monospace by hand — no tools, just word choice

Justified text is nearly impossible to do well in monospace. Because every character occupies the same width, the usual tricks for evening out lines fall apart: right-alignment means counting spaces, centering can’t split a half-space, full justification leaves ugly oversized gaps, and hyphenation draws too much attention while breaking copy-paste. That’s why plain text files almost never attempt it.

In the late 1990s, a writer known as rs1n sidestepped the problem entirely for his Super Metroid strategy guide. Rather than reaching for a justification algorithm, he rewrote the prose itself — picking words whose lengths happened to fill each line exactly, so every right margin landed cleanly with no double spaces. The effect holds for over 17,000 words, all composed in a plain ASCII editor. His FAQ answer to what program he used: none, he just chose words carefully.

The piece frames this as a curiosity rather than a technique to adopt, but it lands as a recognizable one. Anyone who has spent an hour tuning a button label or tooltip to fit a fixed-width slot in a cramped UI knows the same instinct — bending the words to fit the container instead of the other way around. It’s a small monument to obsessive craft in a constraint most people would simply give up on.