Lorem Ipsum Generator

Placeholder text exists so that a layout can be judged as a layout. Real copy pulls a reader into reading it, and lorem ipsum has the right shape without the meaning: word lengths and letter frequencies close enough to English that the page looks like a page.

It is real Latin, badly damaged

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor
sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...

  "Nor is there anyone who loves pain itself
   because it is pain..."

  Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, 45 BC

The familiar opening is the middle of "dolorem ipsum"
with the first two letters lost. That is how a page
of philosophy became the standard specimen text.

The passage is from Cicero's De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, and the specimen version dates to an unknown typesetter in the 1500s who cut the text apart to show off a typeface. "Lorem" is no Latin word at all: it is what was left of dolorem when a line break took the first two letters with it.

It became universal because Letraset printed it on transfer sheets in the 1960s and then Aldus put it into PageMaker in the 1980s, and it has been in every layout program since.

The seed

seed: helio    ->  always the same paragraphs
seed: helio    ->  the same again
seed: tuesday  ->  something else entirely

Which is what makes a screenshot reproducible and a
visual regression test stop failing at random.

Most generators of this kind give you different text on every click, which costs you three things: a screenshot that cannot be reproduced, a visual regression test that fails on every run, and no way to show somebody else exactly what you were looking at.

Here the text comes from a small deterministic generator fed by the seed, so the same settings always produce exactly the same words, andCopy link gives you a link carrying the settings and the seed together. Press New for a different one.

Other scripts, and why they are not a gimmick

A design that holds together in Latin can come apart everywhere else. Cyrillic and Greek run longer for the same content and will overflow a button sized to its English label. Japanese has no spaces at all, so a layout that relies on one to wrap does not wrap, and every character is the width of two. Arabic runs right to left and finds every hard-coded margin in a stylesheet.

The accented set is a deliberate mix of European languages chosen for the range of marks, because a line height that looks fine in English clips the circumflexes and the ring above the å.

None of it is translated, and none of it means anything. It is common words in random order, which is exactly what lorem ipsum is.

Counting by characters

Filling a field to test a limit is the one case where the count that matters is characters and not paragraphs. Asking for a number of characters gives you at most that many, cut back to a word boundary so the result is not half a word, which means the answer is usually a few short. If you need the exact length, pad it.

Do not ship it

Lorem ipsum in production is a known genre of embarrassment, and it reaches live sites regularly enough that searching for it turns up real ones. If placeholder text is going anywhere near a build, it is worth a grep in the release checklist. The same string that makes it obvious in a design makes it easy to catch in a repository.