Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice.
Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?
On C64 the signs of puberty were usage of words like “lamer”, “loser/looser”
Loser vs looser was especially painful. “Haha, we know it’s loser but looser sounds cooler.” A lame cover up, somewhat contradicting the whole meaning.
90% of the scroll texts were about contrived stories of displaying superiority over lamers and losers.
The folks from Finland appeared to be a bit over the top with references to their weight lifting careers to appear like some sort of brutal fighting machine.
oh my god that person wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" I binge read it last week and it was exceptional. What a world. These are the kind of people that I look up to and aspire to be like.
I vaguely recall seeing a GameFAQs walkthrough that did this, and I think it might have been for a Final Fantasy game of some kind, but unfortunately I can't remember more than that.
Wow, this is wild! Maintaining perfect justification solely through word choice is... quite a writing constraint, lol. I don't think I've seen this done before.
Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in.
For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can not have nicely formatted comments unless I do it manually, which I do sometimes but in general just costs to much time, especially as any small change often forces redoing several lines.
You have to deal with long identifiers that you preferably do not want to break across lines, [nested] lists, tables, code blocks, or ASCII art contained in comments, distinguish between hyphens as part of words and hyphens inserted by hyphenation, there might be structured comments like XML doc and Javadoc tags, ... When I saw Tom7's Badness 0, I considered throwing a LLM at the problem, but I think that this is not [yet] practical if you want it in real-time and without hallucinated comments.
Does something like this already exist or something to build on top that would make writing an extension not a year-long effort?
I use this extension extensively. It's not auto-wrapping, but you can bind it to an easy shortcut and wrap when you need to. I find it almost indispensable. I wrote a vscode extension to do the same thing, then discovered this one which does it far better.
I will give that one a try, might at least speed up things, but it still misses hyphenation and justification. Hitting enter when reaching the guide line takes the least effort but this might be really handy when editing existing comments, especially with auto wrap enabled.
Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?