“I just chose words carefully”
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
A writer manually justified 17,000 words of a game guide by carefully choosing word lengths.
The article describes the difficulty of typesetting in monospace, especially with full justification. It highlights rs1n's 1990s guide to Super Metroid, where the author manually chose words to perfectly align each line's right margin for over 17,000 words, using no software. The FAQ notes: "I just chose words carefully. Everything was done with an ASCII editor."
The author compares this to avoiding widows and orphans in physical books and to developers spending hours adjusting UI text strings to fit a fixed width.
What commenters are saying
Comments admire the feat but also connect it to related examples. A top comment recounts Gillian Anderson's story about Chris Carter writing X-Files dialogue to form perfect rectangles without widows, though some commenters who checked scripts found inconsistent evidence. Another links to Tom7's "Badness 0" video, which uses an LLM to automatically achieve the same result in LaTeX.
One commenter distinguishes widows from orphans, noting that Carter's described habit likely aimed for full justification, not just widow elimination. Another mentions David Milch's reported use of iambic pentameter in Deadwood.