The 17,000-word Super Metroid guide typeset by hand, one word at a time
"I just chose words carefully."
In the late 1990s, rs1n wrote a guide to Super Metroid on GameFAQs that stretches over 17,000 words, each line perfectly justified without a single double space. How? By carefully choosing every word so that the line lengths match exactly, using only an ASCII editor. This feat of manual typesetting is a testament to patience and precision, and it's a curiosity worth exploring for anyone who's ever struggled with monospace formatting or UI text constraints.
None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.
- easydidit
In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g.
/*
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Application Name
|--------------------------------------------------------------------------
|
| This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the
| framework needs to place the application's name in a notification or
| other UI elements where an application name needs to be displayed.
|
*/
https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/13.x/config/app.ph...
- sho_hn
There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.
- AgentOrange1234
In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
- howToTestFE
Pretty sure Laravel source code comments above functions were always something like 3 lines, with each line slightly less length than the previous one. Not sure if this is still done or enforced at all, but it was always neat to see.
Here is an example - https://github.com/illuminate/database/blob/master/Connectio... - looks like each one is 3 characters shorter.
- _jackdk_
I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.
Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...
- card_zero
This might potentially
rejuvenate the writing
by disrupting habitual
patterns, which forces
more original choices.
- benji-york
The maintainer of top fully-justifies his commit messages, e.g., https://gitlab.com/procps-ng/procps/-/commit/e6f22569e9db16d...
commit e6f22569e9db16dbef7d9bdee5bb41b8cb7a03ca
Author: Jim Warner <james.warner@comcast.net>
Date: Tue Jul 23 00:00:00 2024 -0500
top: attempt once again to allow help text translation
Back when our release 4.0.1 was being readied, sources
were sent to the TP (Translation Project). However one
person named Benno Schulenberg refused to release them
for translation. His stated reason was the top command
line help text which then finally included long forms.
He demanded that the help text be broken into separate
strings instead of a single large string. But, all the
top text (some much more complex) has just one string.
So that stated reason was, at the least, inconsistent.
[ I suspect the real reason was that Mr. Schulenberg ]
[ thought that the carefully right-justified English ]
[ wording would also be required of translations too ]
The bottom line was that Benno took it upon himself to
change the TP motto from "you code, we translate" into
"first we tell you how to code and then we translate".
Rather than bend a knee to that despot, I disabled the
text entirely, admittedly denying users a translation.
Now, with this commit we enable translatable help text
but with a hint included to ignore the justified text.
Reference)s):
. Oct, 2 […]
- gyomu
> At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?
I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')
See also: localizing your interface to German
- unicorn_platfor
I like the idea that arbitrary constraints can actually improve writing. Without a constraint, it's easy to fall back on familiar phrasing, while having to work around something unusual forces you to reconsider each word. I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.
- ivw
suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically