Lorem ipsum

Why this text

The passage is a corrupted extract from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum, written in 45 BC, mangled by a printer some time in the sixteenth century and used as filler ever since.

Its usefulness is that it is not readable. Placeholder text in English gets read: reviewers comment on it, and a designer trying to show a layout ends up discussing the copy instead. Nonsense that has the letter frequencies and word lengths of a real language keeps attention on the design.

That is also why “just type asdf” is worse than it looks — a block of repeated characters has none of the texture that a paragraph of prose has, so it sets nothing like the real thing.

Writing Chinese?

Latin filler is useless for a Chinese layout. The line lengths, the absence of spaces, the punctuation width and the way a paragraph breaks are all different, so a design that looks right in lorem ipsum can fall apart when the real text arrives.

There is a separate page for that: Chinese filler.

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