Show HN: A Reddit reader that looks like the frontpage of a print newspaper

The hyphenation on the center-spread column doesn't look great, leaving big whitespace gaps in justified text.

In my experience, "hyphens: auto" in browsers doesn't work well at widths smaller than 80ch. The "center-spread" column is currently set to width: 600px, approximately 67ch. Changing it to width: 80ch looks much, much better, in my opinion.

I also suggest adding the Safari variant, "-webkit-hyphens: auto", and add the lang="en" attribute to your tag, to enable hyphenation in Firefox.

You could replace the lipsum with the top comment (or few) from the post!

I didn't know I wanted this

It’s very interesting from a psychological standpoint: the current front page headline (for me?) is “Planets and dwarf planets to scale in size, rotation speed, axial tilt and oblateness (numbered in distance order from Sun)”

If I were reading this on /r/dataisbeautiful, I’d immediately parse and grok the headline just fine. But with this, my mindset was on the reporting of actions or events and I read “to scale” as an infinitive (verb/action), almost like the intro to a sci-fi novel that starts with a stunning declaration that in x days, all planets will actively shrink by y% in some never before seen cosmic event.

If you’ll allow me to use a programming analog, it wasn’t until my tokenizer hit the first parenthesis that my lexer switched to the correct track.

It’s really sad how much typesetting and font rendering has taken a backseat since the 80s and 90s. It seems like just yesterday the race was about finding the optimal algorithms for typesetting text to avoid rivers, have aesthetically pleasing ragged or justified text, tweak word breaking heuristics to avoid local optima that give poor overall results, etc and coming up with fonts that were hand-hinted and carefully designed to display as correctly as possible on the output devices of the time.

Now, we’re lucky if we get an option to manually specify hyphenation points for line wrapping, we have horribly thin and broken “web fonts” that supersede even locally installed versions with correct hinting of the same typeface, have disabled subpixel rendering so we can play nicer with animations, transitions, and useless effects, and consider ourselves incredibly lucky if we get real italics rather than oblique versions of the Roman typeface *for fonts with italic versions around since the early ‘90s.