Lorem Ipsum text

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
April 4, 2024
4 replies
7339 views

Everytime I put placeholder text in Indesign, it doesn't show "Lorem Ipsum". It shows Greek text, but I've never seen it like this before. I've tried changing the Placeholder language but that doesn't do anything. However, when I'm in illustrator and put in placeholder text it shows Lorem Ipsum.

Type

Barb Binder

Community Expert

Hi Katie:

If starting with Lorem ipsum is important, you can generate the original "classic" lorem ipsum text on this site:

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do..."
https://loremipsum.io/ and use Mike's advice to replace placeholder.txt with what you generate.

Or, have some fun with others from the same site. Bacon Ipsum? Hipster Ipsum? Zombie Ipsum? The world is your ipsum: https://loremipsum.io/ultimate-list-of-lorem-ipsum-generators/

~Barb

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

I vaguely recall that the Lorum Ipsum placeholder text got upgraded to actual Latin text based on Cicero's work circa 45 BCE "De finibus bonorum et malorum" ("On the ends of good and evil") instead of the corrupted famous Lorum Ipsum fragment which came from that work and was scrambled into nonsense Latin sample text about 500 years ago.

"Greeking" is an Adobe InDesign (and PageMaker) term which means to NOT draw text characters accurately on the monitor screen; instead painting a gray bar where the text would otherwise be. You see this effect whenever you zoom out and the page design becomes so small that there arent enough pixels to describe the individual letters.

Illustrator inserts a much smaller amount of Lorum Ipsum text. It will repeat itself pretty soon if you try to make it fill a great volume of text area. InDesign has a larger volume of actual Latin text to insert. Both ID and AI can have a custom placeholder.txt file copied into the application folder in order to make it use a text of your choosing. I made my placeholder text to contain an English-language version of Cicero's famous writing. Sometimes in the past I have used Charles Dickens text from "A Tale of Two Cities" as familiar sample text. No matter the text chosen, I use English sample text so that the spell-checker doesn't create a sea of red squiggles on the monitor screen.

Mike Witherell

Willi Adelberger

Community Expert

You can make your own placeholder text in InDesign. Yoz have to write and save any text and save it for the language you want it with the term of the command of that language and save it beside the InDesign Application.
In English must the file have the name Placeholder.txt; in German it must be named Platzhalter.txt and for other languages use the same syntax. If your paragraph has this language it draws the correct placeholder file for that language.
To get the text correct encoded I recommend to write it in InDesign and export the story as .txt text file.
If you get another text as expected look if there exists a different placeholder text file beside the program.

BobLevine

Community Expert

Hold the cmd (Mac) or ctrl (Win) key down when selecting the fill with placeholder text command. Choose whatever you want from there.

K

Katie096Author

Participant

Yes I am expecting the text to start with Lorem ipsum. It used to start with that but I'm not sure how it changed. I did try holding command and that didn't help either. When I choose Greek, it switches to the greek letters