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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.

Other launches for this product

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