Lorem ipsum is dummy text that is used in the publishing and graphic design industry to show where the text is going to be placed in a document, advertisement, or web page. It’s used to give people a feel for the layout of a page when the actual words (also called body copy) have yet to be written.
Lorem ipsum has been used since the invention of publishing in about 1500 and as you can imagine it both looks and sounds like genuine Latin. Contrary to popular opinion, lorem ipsum is not actually meaningless babble, but is a mixture of Latin words taken from a passage by Cicero (according to Richard Mc Clintock, a Latin professor from the University of Virginia).
Where do you get it?
The best place to get dummy text is from a dummy text generator. My favourite is Blind Text Generator. Not only does it generate lorem ipsum, it can also generate dummy text in a few other varieties such as far far away, which kind of sounds a bit like a passage from the Hobbit.
Here’s an example of far far away:
Far far away, behind the word mountains, far from the countries Vokalia and Consonantia, there live the blind texts. Separated they live in Bookmarksgrove right at the coast of the Semantics, a large language ocean.
It’s nonsense, but it’s funny.
Why is it useful?
A blind text generator is useful because you can specify the number of words or characters you need, as well as the number of paragraphs. You may not know exactly what it is you are going to say, but it can help you work out how many words you actually need. If you are constrained by space (and you often are), you can pop a few of these sentences and paragraphs into your layout and it will give you a pretty good idea of what you have room for and what will look good. By looking good, I mean you will end up with text that is big enough for your audience to read and doesn’t look squashed or uncomfortable. If someone else is writing the copy, you can let them know that you only need three or four sentences, for example.
Do you always have to go online to generate dummy text?
Some software programs have built-in text generators. In PowerPoint for example, you can generate text by typing =lorem(p,s) into a text box and pressing enter. The ‘p’ stands for the number of paragraphs and the ‘s’ is for the number of sentences you want. Here are some detailed instructions.
Try it, it’s fun.
Margaret Moon 