Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and
typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text
ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and
scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five
centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially
unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets
containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software
like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.
Why do we use it?
It is a long established fact that a reader will be
distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The
point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of
letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like
readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use
Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will
uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved
over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour
and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random
text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making
it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney
College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words,
consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the
word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum
comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum"
(The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a
treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The
first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from
a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is
reproduced below for those interested. Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from
"de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by Cicero are also reproduced in
their exact original form, accompanied by English versions from the 1914
translation by H. Rackham.
Where can I get some?
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum
available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected
humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you
are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't
anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum
generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary,
making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of
over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to
generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is
therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic
words etc.