What is Lorem Ipsum and why is it used?
What is Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is actually a dummy text meant for the printing and typesetting industry, a standard one, which has been there since the1500s. Not only it’s been there for the last five centuries, but even in the age of electronic typesetting, has remained perpetually unmodified and unaltered in essence.
It came into vogue in the 1960s when Letraset sheets with Lorem Ipsum passages were introduced and of late, with Aldus PageMaker which is a desktop publishing software containing versions of Lorem Ipsum onboard.
Sometimes called “Lipsum”, it’s a placeholder text utilized while designing and creating content. It assists designers to decide where the content can be placed even when the content is not written or finalized. It appeared and emerged from a Latin text, although to readers today, it may strike as being unintelligible and useless.
Origin of Lorem Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum emerges and takes shape from a piece of classical Latin literature of 45 BC. which makes it to be around 2000 years of age. It appears from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” which means “The extremes of good and evil”. The author was Cicero, who penned it in 45 BC. This is an article or a piece of writing on the theory of ethics, apparently quite popular during the period of Renaissance. In use since 1500s, the Lorem Ipsum passage reads,
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.”
Why the need
It is quite natural that a reader gets distracted by the readable content of the page while looking at the pattern and composition of letters. When actual content is placed by designers in a layout before completion of design, it disturbs the designer as well as the client by drawing the centre of attention away from the visual elements of the task at hand.
So, Lorem Ipsum is used as default model text by many web page editors and multiple desktop publishing packages. As the text is senseless and it spoofs the actual content layout, designers often utilize it to test aspects of the text. The exercise encompasses size, colour, font styles and creation of readable text which is visually most pleasing with regard to the content. Normally, specimen papers of the print industry needed to use it.
However, as the industry evolved, Lorem Ipsum began to be conspicuously visible on word processors and in transfer sheets too. Currently, it’s utilized for any print or digital copy, including Letter headings, Brand bios, Product descriptions, Contact details and Websites etc.
Final say
To change the mock content, there are software tools to spawn multiple versions of the traditional Lorem Ipsum. They may include humorous sections of Latin text or a simple mixture of the orders. To fill a short gap in the design, Lorem Ipsum text can be plainly copied and pasted into the template. For pieces of content which are longer, additional crazy text can be created on multiple external websites with the help of a Lorem ipsum generator to make one’s own Lorem Ipsum copy.
