Lorem Ipsum Origins

Painfully Geeky

In an actual bit of Latin -- dolorem ipsum quia dolor -- we see the roots of the Lorem ipsum placeholder text. Although garbled, the famous nonsense text can be found in a passage from Cicero circa 45 BC translated as "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain...." So how did it end up being used for desktop publishing? Theory is that some printer back in the 1500s scrambled the passage to use in a type specimen book. Do you really need to know this to do desktop publishing? No, but it's great for dinner party conversation and it makes you sound real smart (or real geeky).