I was in awe when I discovered this, and decided to apply this simple rule to the help text of a small command line tool I was working on: https://git.bitmycode.com/sodimel/n#help
“I just chose words carefully”
161–170 of 364 posts
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#162In 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.
Ah, but I use a normal proportional font in my editor so same and diff have different widths. That was the fun comment. The serious ones: 1. I'm trading the ability to align statements on consecutive lines for a more pleasant reading experience. 2. Nobody ever complained that my source code is a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 instead of a = 1 ab = 2 abc = 3 3. No tables or diagrams in comments of course but I think that I could…
They would complain if it's:
a = 1
ab = 2
abc = 3Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#163It's a good illustration what a terrible idea text justification is. It should never even become an acceptable formatting technique as the entire purpose of reading is predictability and varying space length is very much the opposite of predictable. To this day I commit no-text-align-justify CSS lint rule to every repo I'm part of.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#164One more example of the utopian idea that, because there are so many dedicated nerds out there for any possible thing imaginable, if we gave people more free time there would always be someone who would volunteer to do xyz task if it was needed and if they had a community who supported them.
That's what comes to my mind anytime I see some huge labor of love like that guy rewriting 17k words to fit nicely.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#165Wow, autism in action ;-P
Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#166Wow, autism in action ;-P Choosing words that carefully takes some serious dedication. Imagine the backtracking required...
> Imagine the backtracking required...
Do things the "waterfall" way and you won't need any backtracking, as every previous line will have been adjusted as you're moving forward, not backwards, to adjust the chosen words.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#167I remember procps top --help did this. I hated the resulting clunky, inconsistent wording enough to add a local patch in my procps build recipe to rewrite it.
Apparently I'm still carrying the patch, so the current version must still do it.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#168I remember reading Project Gutenberg email updates from Michael S. Hart in the mid to late 90s that were famously formatted like this. It’s not too hard if you try, once you get in the groove :-)
Indeed:
From Wikipedia:
"Michael Hart's email messages and blog posts had equal line length paragraphs in monospaced font: he chose the wording in such a way that each line had the same number of characters."
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#169In 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.
In Japan they have the abbreviation “NG” (“not good”) that’s often used as the opposite of “OK”. I always liked how, when I worked for a Japanese machine learning company, classifiers would be between “OK” and “NG”. Maybe semantically “okay” and “not good” are not great opposites, but I always liked how having textual alignment makes the contrast immediately obvious
It's not unusual in France to use OK and KO. I never liked it much because it's too easy to confuse and no semantically a good opposite either, but visually it does look very balanced.
Re: “I just chose words carefully”
#170this 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
It's just neatness. Like ironing clothes or putting on a tie, it's not about it serving a functional purpose. It's just to show off straight lines.
I know, but it feels much more neat to me to have even spacing between words