Justif
publication-grade text justification for the web
Details
- External ID
- 48941987
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Justif
- Website domain
- lyall.co
- Launched
- July 17, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1081242532855436
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
I've long been a fan of justified text. I think it looks clean and elegant. But I've always been disappointed by how browsers render it, with gaping spaces that distract me to the point of making the text near unreadable.Browsers have got better recently at handling justified text [0], but still are not near that TeX/InDesign level of quality that I crave.Inspired by running headfirst into disappointment with how text justification looked on a recent project site of mine, and by Oskar Wickström's "Proportional Web" [1], I decided to make a drop in js library that justifies text at least as well as TeX can, all with a single <script> import.Justif also has the benefit of providing consistent text layout across browsers. Blink (Chrome), Gecko (Firefox) and WebKit (Safari) all justify text differently, so normally what the user sees depends on what browser they use.Take a look at the demo, play around with it, try some different browsers. Constructive feedback is always welcome.0: https://cloudfour.com/thinks/justified-text-better-than-expe...1: https://owickstrom.github.io/the-proportional-web/
Enrichment
- Theme
- typography and unicode text tools
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- publication-grade text justification for web
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Knuth-Plass dynamic programming line breaking, hyphenation, and microtypographic adjustments across diverse fonts in web browsers require specialized algorithmic typography expertise.
What it would actually take: Building this requires implementing the Knuth-Plass dynamic programming algorithm in JS/Wasm, Liang's hyphenation pattern dictionary, and sub-pixel glyph advance calculation. It must hook cleanly into CSS styles, handle dynamic DOM resize events via ResizeObserver without layout thrashing, and alter letter-spacing and word-spacing at the line level. This demands specialized domain knowledge in font file formats, HarfBuzz-style shaping/metrics, and advanced browser layout mechanics.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 73 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #68 of 74 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 259 days after the earliest competitor.
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