Lorem ipsum
" Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit ... " is a dummy text that is to mean anything, but is used as a placeholder in the layout to get an idea of the finished document. The distribution of the letters and the word length of the pseudo- Latin text is about the natural Latin language. The text is deliberately incomprehensible, so that the viewer is not distracted by the content.
Historical origin
The text itself is not a proper Latin, even the first word " Lorem " does not exist. Nevertheless, it can be seen in the text a number of Latin words that come from the very similar paragraph 10/01/32 to 10/01/33 from Cicero's De finibus bonorum et malorum, which was widely known in the Middle Ages:
As a placeholder text should have been common in setters Lorem Ipsum passages, since the 16th century. Since the 1960s, the company used Letraset them to demonstrate the shape of different font types. Even otherwise, there are many slightly differing versions of this text.
While in the past the few lines of " Lorem ipsum " repeated continuously in dummy text, so today is the found text by Cicero as the basis of many Lorem ipsum - generator sets, building on creating longer sections. The term consequence is so widely common for many desktop publishing programs have a menu item for dummy text that generates a sequence that begins with " Lorem ipsum ". In addition, today the term sequence " Lorem ipsum " is recognized in the electronic preparation and printing a warning message, so that a publication is not inadvertently switched to pressure with residual dummy text. For the typesetting with LaTeX, there are add-on packages, including Microsoft Word has added a function to generate the dummy text.
Practicability
The Lorem ipsum text is indeed suitable for the editorial work to find blind passages of text quickly using the search function, however, a variety of design tasks can not be solved with this template. Since the word length and frequency of the letters do not match the German text and capital letters in English have a much larger presence, the actual gray value of a text block by Lorem ipsum can not judge. For the same reason, the optical line penetration is misleading. Substituting following the design of the Lorem ipsum text - by German text, the layout gives a different impression. Do you need a German dummy text whose content does not distract, so you can use various online tools mix the letter sequence in your own templates. Another problem is just the lack of meaningfulness, because of a blind watermark to also checked whether a selected combination of style, line length, leading, etc. leads to a good readability. This can be better to check a text with content.