The strange art of justifying text by hand, one word at a time
A 1990s Super Metroid FAQ, written entirely in ASCII, has resurfaced as proof someone once justified 17,000 words without a single line of code - though a viral X-Files anecdote attached to it doesn't quite hold up.
The claim
A blog post by designer Marcin Wichary has been doing the rounds this week, and it centres on something genuinely verifiable: a Super Metroid FAQ written in the late 1990s by a fan going by rs1n, in which every single line of plain-text ASCII ends flush against the right margin. No double spaces, no hyphenation, no software doing the work. Just, in the author’s own words from the guide’s FAQ, “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.” That line is quoted directly and appears to be genuine - the full guide runs to roughly 17,000 words, all of it seemingly typeset by hand in an ASCII editor.
Why this is actually hard
Monospace text is a nightmare for anyone who cares about neat margins. Every character takes up identical width, so there’s no way to stretch or compress a word to make it fit - unlike normal typesetting, where kerning and variable letter widths do a lot of invisible work. Centring monospace text is already awkward because you can’t split a space in half. Full justification is worse: without proportional spacing, you either end up with ugly gaps stretched across a line, or hyphens breaking words in a way that looks jarring and, worse, wrecks the text if anyone tries to copy and paste it. That’s why justified plain text is rare. rs1n’s solution was to sidestep the maths entirely and simply rewrite sentences, word by word, until they happened to hit the margin exactly. That’s not a formatting trick - it’s closer to writing constrained poetry, done 17,000 words over.
The X-Files tangent - handle with care
The Hacker News discussion around the article latched onto a comparison that’s worth treating carefully rather than repeating as fact. A commenter cited Gillian Anderson describing X-Files creator Chris Carter insisting scripts avoid “widows” - lines that don’t fill out cleanly - so dialogue formed “a perfect rectangle” on the page. It’s a fun anecdote, and it is what Anderson reportedly said in an interview. But another commenter in the same thread pushed back: forming perfect rectangular blocks of dialogue for nine years would be a far more extreme, deliberate exercise than simply avoiding orphaned words, and the publicly available X-Files scripts they checked don’t show anything unusually rigid. In other words, this is an actor’s recollection of a director’s quirk, not documented proof that entire scripts were hand-justified the way the Super Metroid guide was. Worth enjoying, not worth treating as equivalent.
Who this actually matters to
Nobody needs to do anything differently because of this. It’s not a bug, a tool, or a trend - it’s a curiosity about painstaking manual effort in an era before proportional-width tricks were common in plain text. If you’ve ever nudged a button label or tooltip string for ages just to stop it wrapping awkwardly in a cramped interface, this will feel familiar. If you’ve ever formatted a physical book manually, this will feel like ordinary craft. The novelty here is that it happened on a screen, in a fan-made game guide, for no reason beyond one person’s evident patience.
The takeaway
There’s nothing to check for security holes or software updates here - this is simply a nice bit of internet archaeology: proof that someone, three decades ago, solved a typesetting problem with sheer stubbornness rather than a tool. Enjoy it as that, and be a little wary of anecdotes bolted on afterwards that haven’t been checked against the actual paperwork.