Show HN: The Federalist Papers, typeset as the 1787 newspapers they ran in

vhwalke

Hi HN, I made this. It started as a weekly reading project with my mother: one Federalist paper a week. I couldn't find an online edition that was actually pleasant to read - most are walls of text or scanned PDFs - so I built one. It's all 85 essays with the original wording (text from the Project Gutenberg edition, publication dates checked against the Library of Congress record and Founders Online), set the way they first appeared: as essays in the New York newspapers of 1787–88, under the pen name "Publius." There's also a clean modern reading mode if the facsimile isn't your thing. The part this crowd might like: the justified text uses Knuth–Plass line-breaking (via a small library called justif - which I found here on HN!), with hanging punctuation and optical margin alignment, set in the IM Fell types. No ads, no accounts, no tracking; reading progress is stored locally on your own device. It's free and the text is public domain. I'd genuinely welcome feedback on the reading experience. (It was recently featured on kottke.org, which is the only reason I'm brave enough to post it here.)

Unearned5161

Lovely project, I've given it a skim and I quite like the presentation. The only thing that I would work on would be to rewrite a lot of the website copy since it's a bit heavy with the llm-isms, which gives it an unfortunate sheen. If theres a repo link, I'd be happy to contribute, since I realize it's no small task.

Teever

Great stuff. I've been doing some digging in this period of American history recently and it has lead me to brainstorm about similar applications of modern AI for historical analysis or presentation. I think there's a lot of newly ripened low-hanging fruit right in fields like History now that LLM tools have either digested a lot of historical sources or can be used to build systems such as this for presenting that data in new ways that engage the reader. One of the ideas I was thinking about was a map for presenting the provenance of an object or an idea. It would be neat to be able to see a map that had markings on it that showed where someone first had an idea -- the apocryphal 'apple falling on their head' moment and then where they wrote their first draft -- maybe they mailed that draft to a friend who offered editing suggestions, then they travelled with a new draft to a distant town because of a neighbouring country invading where they were, then they sent it off to a printing press where a small run of pamphlets was made and they were distributed across a region to a few cities. Seeing all those key moments for the genesis of an idea, invention, or object in a map with play/pause rewind/fast forward controls + the ability to put other things on the map ot watch their spread and visualize the flow and interplay of information over time would be fascinating and could lead to some really good insights.

goosethe

this is excellent typesetting

rayiner

Thank you, this is really cool. Lovely!