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I'm testing out some fonts, and I'd like to see how they look with language that use more than the basic latin alphabet, in my case Dutch, German, Spanish, Polish and Portuguese.

Is there a tool (preferably online) that can generate lorem ipsum like text which looks like one or more of those languages?

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    Well, Lorem ipsum is in Latin on purpose. It's supposed to look like nonsense to people so you don't concentrate on it much because it's designed to just be placeholder text to take uproom. While I suppose it could be used to test out typography, it is not its intended purpose. However I do think it's a valuable question to ask if there's a tool that allows you to preview various fonts with non-Latin characters.
    – Hanna
    Aug 14, 2013 at 19:59
  • That is one of the intended purposes of Lorem Ipsum - to check type color on a layout. It's not as ideal as real content, of course.
    – DA01
    Aug 20, 2013 at 1:56
  • afaik its not latin but only partly latin
    – tim human
    Aug 21, 2013 at 8:54
  • @timhuman It's real Latin, but truncated: straightdope.com/columns/read/2290/… Aug 24, 2013 at 11:37
  • I'd describe it more as "scrambled" than "truncated". The first sentence "lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..." is a mostly intelligible part of a Latin phrase except it is missing context, but from then on it is mostly jumbled words that aren't intelligible at all, apart from being jumbled from Latin texts. Aug 27, 2013 at 0:53

9 Answers 9

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Here's what I'd do in this situation: take the text of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and run it through Google Translate for each of the languages you need.

The text, translated, will be nonsensical (it's nonsensical anyway if you take the literal English meanings of the words), but separated into sentences and paragraphs. Copy and paste to a text editor in UTF-8 mode to save as plain text. That should work well for your purposes.

(Bonus Tip for InDesign: Take any of these plain text files and copy to the InDesign program folder with the name placeholder.txt to have it automatically inserted by the Type>Fill with Placeholder Text command.)

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We've a specific ipsum generator for Spanish language which actually uses sentences from Don Quixote. Text contains "Ñ" and accents, so its quite useful for testing UTF-8 related incidents. I suppose there may be some other region located generator for other countries.

http-www-quijotipsum-com (link has been disabled because domain now, in 2023, hosts a malicious site)

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  • Link now dead...
    – Miriam
    Apr 11, 2020 at 21:05
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For LaTeX there are several packages available. They can include some text or complete documents including headings into the TeX document. Some of them change the included text depending on the selected language for the document. Some of these packages are:

  • blindtext available languages: English (American, british), German (old and new orthography), Catalan, Latin and French. Other languages can be easily added ...
  • lipsum displays lorem ipsum ...
  • kantlipsum only English.
  • ptext only persian language
  • plipsum for plain TeX.
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Have you considered using pangrams? These are sentences that contain every letter of the alphabet. Pangrams occur in most languages (see the wiki link).

For example:

German (with umlauts and ß): Victor jagt zwölf Boxkämpfer quer über den großen Sylter Deich - Victor chases twelve boxers across the great dam of Sylt

Polish (each letter exactly once) Pójdźże, kiń tę chmurność w głąb flaszy! - Come on, drop your sadness into the depth of a bottle!

You could use several of these and mix them up in order for the text to feel more random.

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    The bad thing about pangrams is that they forgo the original purpose of the Lorem ipsum: unreadable nonsense. This is to keep the viewer's attention on the lay-out, and not the text content. Viewers will be tempted to read the pangrams. Some of them are even funny, and I guess that's not the main impression you want your design to have.
    – Vincent
    Aug 16, 2013 at 9:16
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    Pangrams are great for type specimen books. But they're not designed to emulate general text in a layout situation.
    – DA01
    Aug 20, 2013 at 1:56
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This Random text generator outputs letter combinations common to whichever language(s) you select.

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I googled "Lorem ipsum generator language."

http://www.lipsum.com/

It has actual coherent text, but you can click on the flags and it translates it into various languages, including the ones you mentioned. That might be sufficient for your needs.

http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/lorem-ipsum

This one seems to do something similar. Click on the flags in the corner and see how the text changes.

http://randomtextgenerator.com/

Another one which generates dummy text and has a dropdown of languages.

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    The first one seems to only be translating the instructions on how to use the site, not the lorem ipsum itself.
    – Yisela
    Aug 15, 2013 at 0:10
  • True, but that itself might actually suffice for dummy copy. Aug 15, 2013 at 0:37
  • The links above do not include special characters (e.g. ü) for german. This makes it a no-go for me. Nov 18, 2015 at 14:23
  • Downvoted, because the lipsum.com translates only instructions and the generated text remains still as latin - so this doesn't answers the question.
    – clt60
    Sep 18, 2020 at 22:19
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While the google search for "dummy text (generator)" should get you some results, most font selling places offer a wide range of options. i.e. at myfonts you can even choose to display newsfeeds and panagrams in 20 different languages.

enter image description here

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I found this, when looking for German filler text.

http://loremipsumonline.com/en/languages/german-lorem-ipsum-generator?g=de

It does include special characters and uses capital letters for nouns (unlike some of the answers above) but the text created does make real (random, but grammatically correct) sentences. Because they are readable, you may need to check for inappropriate content before use.

Example:

Ich kann so ein Leben nicht leben. Ich vermute, das ist anders, wenn du darüber längerfristig nachdenkst. Es ist eine schwere Aufgabe, zwischen richtig und falsch zu unterscheiden, aber man muss es tun. Das liegt daran, dass du nicht allein sein willst.

Das wird 30 € kosten. Das wird nie enden. Ich werde bald zurück sein.

Es kann sein, dass ich bald aufgebe und stattdessen ein Nickerchen mache. Mach dir keine Sorgen. Ich weiß einfach nicht, was ich sagen soll.

Translates to

I can not live such a life. I suppose it's different when you think about the longer term. It is a difficult task to distinguish between right and wrong, but you must do it. This is because you do not want to be alone.

This will cost € 30. This will never end. I'll be back soon.

It may be that I give up soon and instead take a nap. Do not worry. I just do not know what to say.

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Adhesiontext is a dummy generator with several language options, including the ones you want

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