5 ms·

Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in mono

by dmd 2y ago

Ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. A few years ago I ran across a ... I think a video game walkthrough? maybe? which was written to be read in monospace font, and it was full justified perfectly all the way through (thousands of lines!) SOLELY through word choice. Anyone know what I'm talking about and have a link?

CM30 2y ago
I vaguely recall seeing a GameFAQs walkthrough that did this, and I think it might have been for a Final Fantasy game of some kind, but unfortunately I can't remember more than that.
- dmd 2y ago
  GameFAQ was enough! FOUND IT! Thank you! https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
  - tvchurch 2y ago
    This is why the internet exists. Incredible catharsis. Love it.
  - 5- 2y ago
    this gets discussed, or at least mentioned, often on hn, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 (this very faq) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773880 (jart's commit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970 (tom7's gnujpl) and bonus: recently i've been enjoying http://arlyle.sdf.org/ http://arlyle.sdf.org/ (unfortunately, links do not work in preformatted text on hn)
    - immibis 2y ago
      "I could totally hear the first one in singing form" Thanks to AI, now you can.[1] [1] https://suno.com/song/22f52bca-7119-4aac-8f0a-5daf9afa509d https://suno.com/song/22f52bca-7119-4aac-8f0a-5daf9afa509d (Also an amusing waste of time. Here's "a religious folk song in the format of a Cisco configuration file": https://suno.com/song/536fe16f-079c-4cce-921c-c2518f6dedb6 https://suno.com/song/536fe16f-079c-4cce-921c-c2518f6dedb6 )
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      > unfortunately Don't worry; I pasted your words into vi just to experience their fully justified bricktext glory.
  - beautron 2y ago
    Wow, this is wild! Maintaining perfect justification solely through word choice is... quite a writing constraint, lol. I don't think I've seen this done before.
    - gsbcbdjfncnjd 2y ago
      I betcha it wasn’t perfectly through word choice alone as I can think of a few “tricks” that could be deployed undetectably.
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        Like what? I would think you could hide much in mono ASCII.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    I would be even more impressed if the TOC and changelog followed the same layout.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
macleginn 2y ago
Cf. also http://tom7.org/bovex/ http://tom7.org/bovex/ (a layout engine that tries to achieve a similar effect by rephrasing the input using an LLM).
- corytheboyd 2y ago
  Wow that was… such an amazing ride. Thank you for sharing!
- mandibles 2y ago
  CSI pun payoff at the end was worth it.
aarreedd 2y ago
Laravel does something similar. Each line of multi-line comments are exactly 3 characters shorter than the previous line. https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database.php https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database...
- tasuki 2y ago
  Wow, this is amazing! Just in that file or everywhere? Why? How do they enforce this for all the contributors who might be unaware?
  - aarreedd 2y ago
    Pretty much everywhere. I guess to demonstrate the framework's attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. No clue
jtolmar 2y ago
That's called bricktext[0], it used to be a thing you'd occasionally see on usenet and places like GameFAQs. [0] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html (Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results.)
- paradox460 2y ago
  Google may have, but kagi still shows it prominently I actually got an angelfire link in my search results a few days ago. Was related to quake 2
- sweeter 2y ago
  oh my god that person wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" I binge read it last week and it was exceptional. What a world. These are the kind of people that I look up to and aspire to be like.
  - klez 2y ago
    That person (Eric S. Raymond) also wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[0], a seminal work for the Open Source movement. [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
    - boffinAudio 2y ago
      See also, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", which I seem to recall was also monospace presented in the good ol' days ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... Or maybe it was just a plain ol' textfile, I forget.
  - baq 2y ago
    just came here to say your post makes me feel old. esr was a classic a cool 20 years ago. enjoy!
- _the_inflator 2y ago
danbruc 2y ago
Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can not have nicely formatted comments unless I do it manually, which I do sometimes but in general just costs to much time, especially as any small change often forces redoing several lines. You have to deal with long identifiers that you preferably do not want to break across lines, [nested] lists, tables, code blocks, or ASCII art contained in comments, distinguish between hyphens as part of words and hyphens inserted by hyphenation, there might be structured comments like XML doc and Javadoc tags, ... When I saw Tom7's Badness 0, I considered throwing a LLM at the problem, but I think that this is not [yet] practical if you want it in real-time and without hallucinated comments. Does something like this already exist or something to build on top that would make writing an extension not a year-long effort?
- RoddaWallPro 2y ago
  https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rewrap https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rew... I use this extension extensively. It's not auto-wrapping, but you can bind it to an easy shortcut and wrap when you need to. I find it almost indispensable. I wrote a vscode extension to do the same thing, then discovered this one which does it far better.
  - danbruc 2y ago
    I will give that one a try, might at least speed up things, but it still misses hyphenation and justification. Hitting enter when reaching the guide line takes the least effort but this might be really handy when editing existing comments, especially with auto wrap enabled.

by dmd 2y ago

CM30 2y ago

I vaguely recall seeing a GameFAQs walkthrough that did this, and I think it might have been for a Final Fantasy game of some kind, but unfortunately I can't remember more than that.

dmd 2y ago
GameFAQ was enough! FOUND IT! Thank you! https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs/10114 https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/snes/588741-super-metroid/faqs...
- tvchurch 2y ago
  This is why the internet exists. Incredible catharsis. Love it.
- 5- 2y ago
  this gets discussed, or at least mentioned, often on hn, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28651093 (this very faq) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40773880 (jart's commit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40605970 (tom7's gnujpl) and bonus: recently i've been enjoying http://arlyle.sdf.org/ http://arlyle.sdf.org/ (unfortunately, links do not work in preformatted text on hn)
  - immibis 2y ago
    "I could totally hear the first one in singing form" Thanks to AI, now you can.[1] [1] https://suno.com/song/22f52bca-7119-4aac-8f0a-5daf9afa509d https://suno.com/song/22f52bca-7119-4aac-8f0a-5daf9afa509d (Also an amusing waste of time. Here's "a religious folk song in the format of a Cisco configuration file": https://suno.com/song/536fe16f-079c-4cce-921c-c2518f6dedb6 https://suno.com/song/536fe16f-079c-4cce-921c-c2518f6dedb6 )
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    > unfortunately Don't worry; I pasted your words into vi just to experience their fully justified bricktext glory.
- beautron 2y ago
  Wow, this is wild! Maintaining perfect justification solely through word choice is... quite a writing constraint, lol. I don't think I've seen this done before.
  - gsbcbdjfncnjd 2y ago
    I betcha it wasn’t perfectly through word choice alone as I can think of a few “tricks” that could be deployed undetectably.
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      Like what? I would think you could hide much in mono ASCII.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I would be even more impressed if the TOC and changelog followed the same layout.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

macleginn 2y ago

Cf. also http://tom7.org/bovex/ http://tom7.org/bovex/ (a layout engine that tries to achieve a similar effect by rephrasing the input using an LLM).

corytheboyd 2y ago
Wow that was… such an amazing ride. Thank you for sharing!
mandibles 2y ago
CSI pun payoff at the end was worth it.

aarreedd 2y ago

Laravel does something similar. Each line of multi-line comments are exactly 3 characters shorter than the previous line. https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database.php https://github.com/laravel/laravel/blob/11.x/config/database...

tasuki 2y ago
Wow, this is amazing! Just in that file or everywhere? Why? How do they enforce this for all the contributors who might be unaware?
- aarreedd 2y ago
  Pretty much everywhere. I guess to demonstrate the framework's attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. No clue

jtolmar 2y ago

That's called bricktext[0], it used to be a thing you'd occasionally see on usenet and places like GameFAQs. [0] http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html http://www.catb.org/esr/jargon/html/B/bricktext.html (Also wow Google has completely erased this concept from its search results.)

paradox460 2y ago
Google may have, but kagi still shows it prominently I actually got an angelfire link in my search results a few days ago. Was related to quake 2
sweeter 2y ago
oh my god that person wrote "The Art of Unix Programming" I binge read it last week and it was exceptional. What a world. These are the kind of people that I look up to and aspire to be like.
- klez 2y ago
  That person (Eric S. Raymond) also wrote "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"[0], a seminal work for the Open Source movement. [0] http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
  - boffinAudio 2y ago
    See also, "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", which I seem to recall was also monospace presented in the good ol' days ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Command_Line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Beginning..._Was_the_Co... Or maybe it was just a plain ol' textfile, I forget.
- baq 2y ago
  just came here to say your post makes me feel old. esr was a classic a cool 20 years ago. enjoy!
_the_inflator 2y ago

danbruc 2y ago

Here is another ooh, this is the thread to ask my question in. For years I wanted to make a Visual Studio [Code] extension that justifies comments as you type including hyphenation but accepting additional spaces as necessary. I never dared to really start beyond some research into relevant algorithms and libraries because it seems pretty complex. I tried to use things like fmt and par but mostly accepted that I can not have nicely formatted comments unless I do it manually, which I do sometimes but in general just costs to much time, especially as any small change often forces redoing several lines. You have to deal with long identifiers that you preferably do not want to break across lines, [nested] lists, tables, code blocks, or ASCII art contained in comments, distinguish between hyphens as part of words and hyphens inserted by hyphenation, there might be structured comments like XML doc and Javadoc tags, ... When I saw Tom7's Badness 0, I considered throwing a LLM at the problem, but I think that this is not [yet] practical if you want it in real-time and without hallucinated comments. Does something like this already exist or something to build on top that would make writing an extension not a year-long effort?

RoddaWallPro 2y ago
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rewrap https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=stkb.rew... I use this extension extensively. It's not auto-wrapping, but you can bind it to an easy shortcut and wrap when you need to. I find it almost indispensable. I wrote a vscode extension to do the same thing, then discovered this one which does it far better.
- danbruc 2y ago
  I will give that one a try, might at least speed up things, but it still misses hyphenation and justification. Hitting enter when reaching the guide line takes the least effort but this might be really handy when editing existing comments, especially with auto wrap enabled.