A paragraph of rs1n’s guide as Wichary reproduces it: flush right, one space between every word, no hyphens.

There is a text file on GameFAQs whose paragraphs are perfectly justified, and the tool that did it was a person deciding which words to use.

Monospaced text does not justify. Every character is the same width, so a line can only be stretched by adding whole spaces, and a paragraph set flush on both sides ends up with rivers of doubled and tripled gaps that the eye trips over. Hyphenation, the fix in every other kind of typesetting, is worse here — hyphens in a fixed-width face shout, and they break copy and paste. That is why the justified text file barely exists as a form. Marcin Wichary’s short post on Unsung, his blog about software craft, walks through each of those failures with an example and then produces the exception.

The exception is the Super Metroid Speed Guide and FAQ by someone called rs1n, copyright 1996–2000, changelog running to May 2001, still on GameFAQs. Its paragraphs are 75 characters wide — not roughly, exactly — and there is no doubled space and no hyphen anywhere in the body. We pulled an archived copy to check: 431 lines land on precisely 75 characters, and the only shorter lines are the last line of a paragraph. Wichary puts the total at 17,000 words in that condition. The author’s explanation, in the guide’s own FAQ, is the whole story: “What program did you use to justify the text? None. I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side. Everything was done with an ASCII editor.”

That is the thing to sit with. Justification here was not applied to the prose; it was the prose. Every sentence about super-jumping in the turtle room or pre-opening a red door was written, reread, and rewritten until the last letter fell on column 75 with single spaces all the way along — for a guide to a 1994 SNES game, distributed as a plain text file, to readers who would never notice. Wichary’s comparison is to the rewrites book typesetters ask for to kill a widow or an orphan, and to the hours anyone who has shipped an interface has spent shaving a tooltip to fit a box. rs1n did it for the length of a novella, unasked.

Two honest notes. GameFAQs sits behind a Cloudflare challenge, so the guide is easier to read through Wichary’s post or a web-archive copy than at the source, and the archived copy we verified against is partial — the 17,000-word figure is Wichary’s count, not ours. And the post itself is dated 30 August; Kottke surfaced it this week. Neither changes the fact of the file, which is the kind of quiet, pointless, complete craftsmanship the web used to be full of and which is worth five minutes of your attention now.