I don’t remember when I discovered Lorem Ipsum text. It could have been in the late 90s when I was using PageMaker to design my college newspaper’s features section. It might have been around 2005 when I took an HTML course at a local community college (gotta love continuing education classes).

Lorem Ipsum text is the industry standard dummy text for printing and graphic design.

According to Ipsum.com, Lorem Ipsum is a dummy text originally used in the printing and typesetting industry. It’s been around since the 1500s and is still used today.

When I began college teaching, I used it to teach formatting and layout. In my writing, I use it to translate word counts into approximate page counts.

I discovered a great site that generates the text for you in your requested word or paragraph count. (You can even get a batch of text measured in bytes.)

The generator is free at the moment, but they are taking donations and looking for people to help translate the site into a foreign language. (Freelance or early-career translators might find this a valuable experience) I don’t have any affiliation with them, but I did just donate $5.00. Trust me, the pains of self-financing a website are many.

If you need placeholder text, check out ipsum.com.