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Lorem Ipsum has been the known default for dummy text. Per a search the last discussion in regards to alternatives is two years old. I thought I would post a new thread on this topic. So, what are updated alternatives to Lorem Ipsum?

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    Hey, it's called Greek text. I have a college degree; I'm no dummy. :)
    – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum
    Commented May 27, 2013 at 10:47

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The appropriate alternative to Lorem Ipsum is a sample text in the language in which the site will be published, using texts that are typical of the intended content, in literary style at least.

The reason is that with dummy texts, you will not see how real texts will behave. Lorem Ipsum texts tend to be pig Latin, nonsense English or something like that. Therefore, they lack letters like é, ß, ô, digits, and special characters, and their average word length tends to be small. The more the actual text content will differ from the dummy language, the more problems of text formatting (like inappropriate shapes of some characters in the chosen font or lack of hyphenation when it would really be needed) will go unnoticed.

The usual argument for using Lorem Ipsum is that it prevents people from getting distracted by the text content, so that they can focus on the visual design. This is largely an imaginary problem. It is in fact more of the problem that people will not try to read the text; often it will not be noticed that the design makes texts too difficult to read (and impossible to read to many people) – due to things like too small font size (often made worse by using dark gray and not black text) too artistic copy text font, too large line length, too small line height, etc.

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If you check out Project Gutenberg, you'll find heaps of public domain text that can be used as filler. I remember a tutorial book I have for...DHTML and CSS I believe it was, where they used text and illustrations from Alice in Wonderland. While it was clearly placeholder text, it was much more interesting to follow than just gibberish Latin. Real world text tends to expose more quirks and little idiosyncrasies in your design, too, as opposed to fake text that you can shape to fit your design perfectly.

To each his own (I use lorem ipsum quite a bit, too!)...different situations call for different solutions.

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Another option is to use scribbles or lines as textfiller, a technique otherwise known as Greeking.

You can look into the following fonts to accomplish this:

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There is a handy picker for alternatives to Lorem Ipsum here:

http://chooseyouripsum.com/

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You can't ask for alternatives for Lorem Ipsum without specifying why you want an alternative. The reason for this is that each alternative has a specific reason for existing.

Lorum Ipsum is nonsensical text that doesn't look like English (it looks a bit like Latin, but it's actually a bunch of nonsensical words strung together). The reason it exists is to stop people from attempting to read the text. Thus, it draws attention away from what the text says and instead draws attention to the design.

Lorem Ipsum is great for previewing a design, or previewing a font, when you don't want people to be paying attention to the copy.

Benefits and drawbacks of Lorem Ipsum over a sample of text in English

  • Benefit: People aren't tempted to read the text. What the text says won't distract people from looking at the design.

  • Drawback: People can't read the text. If you actually wanted to test the readability of a font, Lorem Ipsum makes it hard because it's specifically designed to prevent people reading the text.

Benefits and drawbacks of Lorem Ipsum over square blocks, etc

  • Benefit: You can still demonstrate the typeface that the text will be set in, and approximate things such as the font weight, font style and other typographic choices.

  • Drawbacks: Pretty much none. There is no advantage to using square blocks or similar over Lorum Ipsum. The only possible situation where I think it'd work is if you specifically did not want to demonstrate a particular typeface.

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The problem with most greeked text that resembles real text is that people don't read. In the context of websites, I often find that I need to make it absolutely clear that "Hey, this page still needs real content!"

To that extent, I've been using 'Xxxx' text:

Xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxx xx x xxxxx xxxx. Xxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxx x xxx. Xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxx xxx. Xxxx xxxx. Xxxxx xx x xxxx x xxxxx xxxxx.

It helps flesh out the page, but is painfully obviously not real text even if you're just scanning the page.

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There is a reason lorem ipsum is used. It has the look of English or other latin alphabet languages but without distracting the reader. It's also easily recognised by most people as dummy text. I guess that is why it has stood the test of time. I like the simplicity of filling the space with lorem ipsum and the other ipsums are fun but they don't look professional, here's an example of lorem ipsum text.

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I noticed NotLoremIpsum is no longer working, which as far as custom generators go, was pretty cool. Luckily, I worked on a custom Lorem generator that brings in copy on any topic from Wikipedia.

The World's Best Industry-Specific Lorem Ipsum Generator

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I think best thing is to write some useful information about the site/design/parties/whatever instead of Lorem Ipsum.

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