I've definitely been guilty of wording my multi-line doc comments in a way that would ensure they'd flow without awkward right margins. I would have a macro in vim that would call the fmt program to reflow the comment to 79 (later 98) characters, and then would iterate on word choice until the comments looked good. Not exactly right-justified, but no very ragged edge either.

In a very real sense this is exactly what LLM watermarking does. It "chooss the words carefully" in order to get text to "line up," but not with a visible margin... instead with a verifiable word distribution that proves the author knew a secret key.

My dad told a story of a classmate in high school going through the effort of manually justifying text in a paper he wrote and being rewarded with a plagiarism accusation.

That was done by typing the whole paper twice, with added spaces the second time.

I 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 :-)

I’ve been searching all over for a classic example of this that I first found around 1986, but I can’t locate it. It went on for a page or two, hand justified lines of maybe 40 characters, and then at the end of it he started making each line one character shorter, until the essay ended with these, the only words I remember from it:

dumb is

what I

think

this

end

is

!

If somebody can find it, share it here, I’m going to post it on my own website so it is saved for history. The last time I saw it was 5 or 10 years ago, and there was only one or two copies on the internet at that time, and now there seems to be none.

I am filled with both a deep admiration and horror at this.

It's shockingly impressive.

Ha, I quite enjoy doing this in comments or commit messages where practicable. But, that's just a few lines. :)

I do this at work with the comments in my code. No one's ever noticed <thumbs-down-emoji>

Man. I kinda want to stress test my memory of super metroid before reading this guide. I could do a sub 3hr run through at 100% when I was a child.

I know I couldn't today.

I have never felt more seen. I do this with comments all the time, rewording things to look nice on that 80 or 100 column mark.