There's no need to adjust your browser or change your eyeglasses. If the above paragraph appears greek to you -- you aren't seeing things. It's an example of greeked text used by desktop publishers and others for years. The Lorem ipsum text is a series of somewhat nonsense sentences derived from some actual Latin components. It is also referred to as placeholder or dummy text. The purpose?
- Use as placeholder text in templates.
- Use during initial page layout and font selection exercises when first starting a design project or when planning a newsletter when you don't have the actual copy available.
- Use with various fonts and layouts to get a feel for how each type choice and design will look with real text. The word lengths and letters are similar to the actual frequency of letters in English which makes it good for approximating any text.
- Use when creating examples of document designs for clients, students. [including Web pages]
- Use when creating type specimen sheets or examples from which clients choose fonts for a project.
You could cut-n-paste the first paragraph of this article over and over, or download the Lorem ipsum text file I created which is simply 3 variations of the same paragraph repeated over and over. Right click (PC) or click/hold (Mac) on the link then save the plain text file to your hard drive. Or click on the link and choose "Save" in your browser. See the sidebar for more variations on the lorem ipsum placeholder text.
[lorem.txt from About Desktop Publishing]
Note: Because the lorem ipsum placeholder text file was saved with no line breaks, in your browser each paragraph may appear as one long sentence scrolling off to the right forever and ever. In your text editor turn on "word wrap" to read the plain text file.
To use this placeholder text file, cut and paste, import, or place the text in your document and apply your desired font styles and other formatting options. For templates (or sample documents to show clients), simply save the file. To use a template, replace the dummy text with your own text.


