What?

The use of dummy text and especially lorem ipsum-text is widely spread. Never heard of lorem ipsum before? Well here’s a explanation of the whole thing stolen from Wikipedia.

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is common placeholder text used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation, such as font, typography, and layout. Substituting dummy text for meaningful content is called “greeking”, as in, “to greek the text”.

(Source: Wikipedia)

Why?

There are several good reasons to use a dummy-text. It’s a good way to check your layout. To write “bla bla bla…” or just the word “text” repeatedly just isn’t good enough. First of all no real text use only one word repeatedly and because of that your text-elements will look all weird. Secondly, while “bla bla…” might work for sketching on a page about your best friend’s hamster’s baby it gives a very unprofessional impression when used on a design for a real paying client.

How?

There are several tools to help you out with your dummy-text so even if you are dead tired of lorem ipsum there is no need to despair.

lipsum.com
This page has been around for years and nowadays they also offer mock banners in different sizes. Html-tags are not included in the text.

lorem2.com
Simple and lucid. Offers short and long paragraphs, lists with long and short items. They also offer a Spanish version. Bad thing might be that it’s not customizable and no html-tags are included.

www.lorem-ipsum.info
Offers lorem ipsum in a variety of languages. You can also download a complete xhtml-document with your text of choice. It’s not as simple as lorem2.com and feels, at least to me, a bit outdated.

html-ipsum.com
This page was released a couple of months ago and offers a variety of text with html-tags included. Great for all of you who found it very annoying to always add html-tags to the text generated at lipsum.com.

www.malevole.com
Are you tired of the ’latin’ stuff and want some plain English these to pages got it. No html-tags included. Sorry people.

Dummy Lipsum for Firefox
Nice and simple plugin where you can choose if you want to have plain text or include html-tags.

loremipscream.com
Wow! This is a really cool idea that makes the use of dummy text fun. No html-tags are included but who cares when they have stuff like reconstituted _why-quotes and randomly generated emo song lyrics?
Kudos for the forged identity-flavour (aka soylent cream). That one is really useful!

I have been searching for a swedish “lorem ipsum”-page but haven’t found one. Does anybody know if a page like that exists?

Ps. Can somebody please buy this cup for me?