Chinese filler text

Latin filler is useless for a Chinese layout

Everything that decides how a block of text looks is different.

• No spaces. Chinese wraps between any two characters, so a line breaks almost anywhere. Latin text breaks at word boundaries, which produces a completely different ragged edge and a completely different set of problems.
• Every character is the same width. A paragraph of Chinese is a solid rectangle in a way Latin prose never is.
• Punctuation occupies a full em. 。and ，take as much room as a character, which changes the rhythm and the line count.
• Line height needs to be larger. Chinese is denser and needs more leading to stay readable, which shifts the whole vertical rhythm of a page.

A layout approved with lorem ipsum can genuinely fall apart when Chinese arrives.

How this text is generated

Two common approaches are both wrong.

Repeating 測試測試測試 produces identical lines, which shows nothing about how real text wraps.

Random characters from the CJK block is worse. Most of that block is rare — obscure variants, characters no font on the machine has — so the output is a wall of tofu boxes. It tells you your font is incomplete and nothing else.

This draws from a curated list of common characters, weighted so frequent ones appear frequently, with full-width punctuation at plausible intervals. The result is meaningless — it is not sentences, and nobody should try to read it — but it sets like Chinese, which is the only thing filler has to do.

Traditional and Simplified

The pool is per-script rather than converted, so this page in Traditional draws from Traditional characters and the Simplified version draws from its own list. That matters for the same reason the rest of it does: 這 and 这 have different stroke densities and set differently on the page.

Nothing is uploaded

Generated in this page.