mistux Site Admin
Joined: 25 Jun 2004 Posts: 1042 Location: South Bend, Indiana USA
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Posted: Sun Sep 03, 2006 9:40 pm Post subject: Lorem ipsum |
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This little bit of text is used a lot.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit esse molestie consequat, vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilisis at vero eros et accumsan et iusto odio dignissim qui blandit praesent luptatum zzril delenit augue duis dolore te feugait nulla facilisi.
This is a common passage of text that is used everywhere in place of real paragraphs. For example, if you design a website for someone else, you may insert a few lines of Lorem ipsum to show what it would look like, even though you don't have the real text that will eventually go there.But where does it come from?
The phrase has been used for several centuries by typographers to show the most distinctive features of their fonts. It is used because the letters involved and the letter spacing in those combinations reveal, at their best, the weight, design, and other important features of the typeface.
It appears to be Latin, but is actually pretty much nonsense.
Lorem ipsum is taken from text that reads, "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit ..." which translates as, "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain...." That is a passage from de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (The Extremes of Good and Evil) written in 45 BC by Marcus Tullius Cicero.
During the 1500s, a printer adapted Cicero's text to develop a page of type samples. Since then, the Latin-like text has been the printing industry's standard for fake, or dummy, text. Before electronic publishing, graphic designers had to mock up layouts by drawing in squiggled lines to indicate text. The advent of self-adhesive sheets preprinted with Lorem ipsum gave a more realistic way to indicate where text would go on a page.
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 'This here is content', making it look like readable text. There also have been many examples where someone has forgotten to change the dummy text for the final copy.
This satisfies my curiosity, and I hope it fulfils your lives too. |
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