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Lorem ipsum is placeholder text commonly used in design and publishing to demonstrate font treatments or layouts without using meaningful content. Originally from a section of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, the passage has been scrambled and words inserted to remove meaning. While resembling Latin, it has no discernible meaning. Lorem ipsum text has been used by printers and publishers to mock up page layouts since the 16th century.

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Himanshu Motwani
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39 views

Techpedia

Lorem ipsum is placeholder text commonly used in design and publishing to demonstrate font treatments or layouts without using meaningful content. Originally from a section of Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, the passage has been scrambled and words inserted to remove meaning. While resembling Latin, it has no discernible meaning. Lorem ipsum text has been used by printers and publishers to mock up page layouts since the 16th century.

Uploaded by

Himanshu Motwani
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Techopedia Explains Lorem Ipsum


Lorem ipsum is the filler text that typically demonstrates the font and
style of a text in a document or visual demonstration. It serves as a place
holder indicating where the text will be in the final iteration.

Originally from Latin, Lorem ipsum has no intelligible meaning. It is


simply a display of letters to be viewed as a sample with given graphical
elements in a file.

"Lipsum" (a portmanteau of lorem and ipsum) generators are commonly


used to form generic text in a file. The words are adequately like normal
text to demonstrate a font, without distracting the reader with its content.

It has been used by printers as placeholder text since the 16th century.

Richard McClintock discovered the origins of the words Lorem Ipsum back
in 1982, who published his findings in 1994 in a letter to the editor
of Before & After magazine who wrongly claimed that the passage had no
meaning.

In fact, it originates from a treatise on the theory of ethics written by


Cicero in 45 BC: "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good
and Evil).

The passage that is usually used is the one below:

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,


sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore
magna aliqua.”
However, although it looks like Latin, the original words from Cicero have
been scrambled and interjected with meaningless filler text for reasons
that defy history.

According to McClintock, but it’s just a theory, a part of the original text
was scrambled by 15th century typesetter who needed placeholder text to
mockup various fonts for a type specimen book.

No matter what the true history may be, today Lorem ipsum is widely
used since it closely resembles English more than Latin, creating a natural
looking block of text that doesn’t distract the reader from the layout.

The passage became popularized in the 1960s when Letraset used it to


advertise their dry-transfer sheets. It reached the digital world between
the 1980s and 1990s when Aldus bundled the text in the word-processing
templates of their desktop publishing software PageMaker.

Later on, it was widely adopted by other word processors, such as


Microsoft Word; and by content management system tools, such as
Wordpress for stock websites, page templates, and themes.

Today, a large number of variations of Lorem ipsum actually exist.

On the Internet, there are many generators that repeat predefined


chunks and combine them with model sentences to create believable
structures.

Some of them inject the random text with random Latin words, humor or
even profanities.

In fact, it can be argued that Lorem Ipsum generators are the first true
generator that ever hit the Internet.

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