Pedro Fortuny Ayuso

A Perl justification utility

Some time ago, a guy asked at the bboard of my server of choice whether someone knew of a utility to get justified text unjustified (or something similar). I was in the mood, and I was enjoying some perl hacking, so I decided to do a justification utility. Yes, there are probably thousands/millions. But it was fun.

After downloading the file, rename it to justifier.pl, for example. Run it as follows:

$ perl justifier.pl file

Or, if you chmod +x it, just

$ ./justifier.pl file

file is expected to be a text file. Help is got with

$ perl justifier.pl -h

There are several command-line options. Some of them (not all) are:

• -wW: set column width to W
• -sr: randomly shuffle outstanding blanks (to prevent rivers)
• -sl: place outstanding blanks to the left
• -il: ignore loose lines (orphan lines of length less than the column width are not justified). You usually want this set.
• -is: ibid but ONLY for lines ending in stops --any of []}).:?!{([]--.
• -pT: prepend string 'T' before any 'artificial' line. Try it.

You can download a Lorem Ipsum textto try it, if you lack one.