Quite the hyperbole. The author even points out how this was done without realizing it — purposefully misspelling certain words to get the right character counts.
Chapter 1: 32 justified lines, "futher" for "further".
Chapter 2: 18 justified lines. "missles" for "missiles" but is consistent throughout.
Chapter 3: 61 justified lines. "missles" consistent again. "limitid" for "limited" (same length). "powerfull"/"usefull", yes, but again looks to be consistent throughout. "liek" for "like" (same length). "essentail" for "essential" (same length).
Chapter 4: 88 justified lines. "missles" and double "l" consistent. "mroph" for "morph" (same length). "eleminate" for "eliminate" (same length). "insure" for "ensure" (same length). "wreckless" for "reckless" but in a non-justified line.
Exactly. It might be impressive if it's consistent, or if the number of misspellings is rare. But starting off with a correctly spelt document and then achieving justification by conditionally removing a letter is... not that hard.
Ought to be possible to test this hypothesis (is the justification done by conditional misspellings?) with some simple scripting.
edit: however, it appears that's not what the author did.
Just read the first paragraph of story and... I can't see any misspellings. (Pasting here, the spellcheck points out Samus, Aran, Metroid and "molted", which I thought was OK.) (E: ok, "futher" for "further".)
A couple of missed words or odd linguistic choices, but compared to the number of lines, not many.
The one specific misspelling that the tweeter points out is consistent throughout.
I was curious so I did the requisite short bit of scripting.
I think you're right, the misspellings are independent. For a few words (like "begining") the text contains the correct and a misspelt word. But for most misspelt words ("carefull" for example) the text contains only the misspelling.
Thus, the text being fully justified is independent of the misspelling.
I think it could have been written in something like MS-DOS edit, which doesn't have a spell check feature anywhere in sight. So it never saw a spell checker, they didn't have too much awareness of the errors. Maybe they also didn't care about spelling too much - thinking up words that fit in the spaces is fun but correcting spelling errors isn't much fun.
The document being an in depth write up of Super Metroid probably also says something about the person's character!
Chapter 1: 32 justified lines, "futher" for "further".
Chapter 2: 18 justified lines. "missles" for "missiles" but is consistent throughout.
Chapter 3: 61 justified lines. "missles" consistent again. "limitid" for "limited" (same length). "powerfull"/"usefull", yes, but again looks to be consistent throughout. "liek" for "like" (same length). "essentail" for "essential" (same length).
Chapter 4: 88 justified lines. "missles" and double "l" consistent. "mroph" for "morph" (same length). "eleminate" for "eliminate" (same length). "insure" for "ensure" (same length). "wreckless" for "reckless" but in a non-justified line.
Wow, I stand corrected.
Every line is justified when you had good reason for writing it.
Exactly. It might be impressive if it's consistent, or if the number of misspellings is rare. But starting off with a correctly spelt document and then achieving justification by conditionally removing a letter is... not that hard.
Ought to be possible to test this hypothesis (is the justification done by conditional misspellings?) with some simple scripting.
edit: however, it appears that's not what the author did.
Just read the first paragraph of story and... I can't see any misspellings. (Pasting here, the spellcheck points out Samus, Aran, Metroid and "molted", which I thought was OK.) (E: ok, "futher" for "further".)
A couple of missed words or odd linguistic choices, but compared to the number of lines, not many.
The one specific misspelling that the tweeter points out is consistent throughout.
I was curious so I did the requisite short bit of scripting.
I think you're right, the misspellings are independent. For a few words (like "begining") the text contains the correct and a misspelt word. But for most misspelt words ("carefull" for example) the text contains only the misspelling.
Thus, the text being fully justified is independent of the misspelling.
I think it could have been written in something like MS-DOS edit, which doesn't have a spell check feature anywhere in sight. So it never saw a spell checker, they didn't have too much awareness of the errors. Maybe they also didn't care about spelling too much - thinking up words that fit in the spaces is fun but correcting spelling errors isn't much fun.
The document being an in depth write up of Super Metroid probably also says something about the person's character!