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.
- 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.
- 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.
- _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.
- 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
- ivw
suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically
- brooke2k
this is only tangentially related to the article, but I've always found text justification strange. For me paragraphs with ragged edges are easier to read than justified paragraphs, because the irregular ending point helps me keep track of where I am. And justification can lead to some very odd-looking lines. So I've just never quite understood why it's so common in typesetting
- alsetmusic
That's the sort of attention to detail that makes me love an app. Apple used to have this. It's why I became one of their users. My hope is that John Ternus understands why this sort of "spinning of wheels" is essential when he takes over. I read that Steve Jobs picked the order of the icons in the Dock himself. Some people know that little things matter.