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No I’m not try­ing to fill space with noth­ing to say (even though it’s Fri­day). For any­one work­ing in an agency, the lorem ipsum text is prob­a­bly the one pas­sage of copy they see most in their pro­fes­sional lives. If they are an art direc­tor or designer they usu­ally wish that all copy could be like lorem ipsum. If it doesn’t fit, sim­ply lose a few let­ters out of a word here or a word there. Copy­writ­ers, how­ever, bemoan the fact that their copy will have to fit a pre-set word limit that’s been cre­ated just to look good in the layout.

The ques­tion that always comes up at some point is: what does it mean? Expla­na­tion of its roots can be found at Lipsum.com. From the site:

Con­trary to pop­u­lar belief, Lorem Ipsum is not sim­ply ran­dom text. It has roots in a piece of clas­si­cal Latin lit­er­a­ture from 45 BC, mak­ing it over 2000 years old. Richard McClin­tock, a Latin pro­fes­sor at Hampden-Sydney Col­lege in Vir­ginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, con­secte­tur, from a Lorem Ipsum pas­sage, and going through the cites of the word in clas­si­cal lit­er­a­ture, dis­cov­ered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sec­tions 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, writ­ten in 45 BC. This book is a trea­tise on the the­ory of ethics, very pop­u­lar dur­ing the Renais­sance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in sec­tion 1.10.32.

As to the mean­ing, it comes from a trea­tise about plea­sure, toil and pain (this feels some­how appro­pri­ate). A full trans­la­tion can be found here – although the lorem ipsum we use today is a bit scram­bled from the orig­i­nal. The Ipsum.com site has a Lorem gen­er­a­tor as does Subterrane.com (along with other non-lorem passages).

Of course you don’t have to go the Latin route (ged­dit?). Using the Jab­ber­wocky XTen­sion in QuarkX­Press you can select from a range of texts (includ­ing Esperanto and Klin­gon). I’ve also seen some agen­cies write their own spoof copy (although the one time I tried this the first per­son to look at the con­cept got half way through the copy before real­is­ing which reduced the impact some­what). But my favourite text gen­er­a­tor so far can be found at Malevole.com – if only all copy was so quick to create.

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