An essential element for any graphic designer, be it print or online, is a block of Lorem Ipsum text. I know for me personally, I can’t function without “Lipsum”, especially since I work in advertising and actually copy isn’t written and approved until long after the design process has begun.
For the last few years, I’ve been using www.lipsum.com for all my Lorem Ipsum needs. The site has some nice features like the ability to select the amount of words, paragraphs, bytes or lists to copy as well as provides a little bit of history on the subject. It’s a nice tool but I really don’t need all those features and to have to load the page each time, highlight the text and copy it can get tiresome.
So I was ecstatic when Matt McInerney emailed me about a sweet little bookmarklet that he’d developed called Lipsumlet. Just drag the bookmarklet into your bookmarks and when you click it, it will spawn a small window with a block of lipsum, automatically copy it to your clipboard and then close the window, all in a matter of 3 seconds. Simple, fast and easy.
And for those of you using Safari (not sure if this works in FireFox), if you drop the bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar, you can quickly access it by pressing the assigned keyboard shortcut. So if you have Lipsumlet as the first bookmark in the bar, you can access it by pressing COMMAND + 1. This makes it even more accessible and saves time.
If you’re on a Mac, theres a nice little dashboard widget called Corporate Ipsum. It lets you use either business jargon or classic ipsum and you can adjust the amount of copy straight away.
Also on Mac, there’s lipServiceX, which sits in your Services menu, and can be used on all Cocoa apps (Safari being one of them; doesn’t work on FFx):
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/17353
it has a paragraph key shortcut and a one-sentence shortcut, so it’s far more efficient than any other method I’ve found
Why is it tagged greek? Lorem ipsum is latin text by Cicero
@Matt
I used to use another lipsum dashboard widget but it become tiresome switching to it each time. With this bookmarklet you don’t have to do much since it copies it automatically.
@Sebastian
That seems really interesting. I’ll check it out. Thanks.
@Sandro
“Greek” text is a term used for placeholder text in a design that has no meaning or sense. Lorem Ipsum is a form of “greeking”.
If you need to generate lorem ipsum in-browser, my preferred solution in Firefox is to use the Ubiquity add-on from Mozilla Labs. Ubiquity is a fully extensible linguistic command-line for your browser, which let’s you issue commands just by typing. Quite ingenious. Their tutorial explains it all.
Someone wrote a “lorem”command (install Ubiquity, then visit that link, and lorem will be automatically installed).
You can then invoke Ubiquity (via a key-combo that you set), and then issue the command by typing lorem N, which will then copy N words of lorem ipsum onto your clipboard.
It’s the perfect solution if you need to insert lorem ipsum into rich-text-fields in your browser, as your hands never have to leave your keyboard.
Related: http://html-ipsum.com/, thanks to a tweet from http://hami.sh
Wow! That’s freakin’ amazing! Thanks for the link Ryan.
Although, if you’re using InDesign, there’s always the “fill with placeholder text” option when a text box is selected.