“Most of the type set in the past five hundred years is justified type, and most of it has been justified line by line, by the simple expedient of altering the space between the words. There are, however, better ways. Scribes justify text as they write by introducing abbreviations and subtly altering the widths of letters. Gutenberg replicated the feat by cutting and casting a host of abbreviations and ligatures along with multiple versions of certain letters differing modestly in width. In the early 1990s, Peter Karow and Hermann Zapf devised a means of doing much the same in the digital medium[.] [...] Another thing computer software can do – because Karow taught it how – is justify text by making subtle alterations in the spaces within letters as well as those between letters and words.”
The Elements of Typographic Style, fourth edition, by Robert Bringhurst, pp 191–192.