You should never justify fixed-width fonts, only proportional fonts. You also shouldn’t think of spaces between words as multiples of one space width. When you

You should never justify fixed-width fonts, only proportional fonts. You also shouldn’t think of spaces between words as multiples of one space width. When you are justifying texts, a space has no defined width, it has an upper bound and a lower bound. I also don’t think that algorithms are the problem. InDesign does a beautiful job at typesetting paragraphs. You can enter an upper bound and lower bound for the space between words and you can display violations of those bounds (the offending words will be highlighted) which you can then manually fine tune. InDesign also offers many other options for hyphenation and justification. (Other professional layout tools have similar options.) The problem might rather be that the effect of such sophisticated typesetting is subtle and it is unlikely that a program like Pages on Mac OS X will be used by typesetters and designers who care about things like that.