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| Issue July-17 | ||
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Lorem Ipsum - 500 years of placeholder |
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| 500 years ago an unknown printer devised a text which should represent - optically - any written information but purposely without any real meaning. He felt that there was a need for a placeholder text which could be used for typesetting. but that using meaningful text would distract from the aim of designing the layout. So he could experiment using different fonts to see what impression they made. It would seem to be generally accepted that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum was to make a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using simple repetative words, making it look like readable English. There are many theories and ideas about how exactly the "Lorem Ipsum dolor sit amet" was developed. As much as one might like to think that Loemr Ipsum might make sense it doesn't. That was as explained important so as not to distract from the layout. The advent of IT did not kill it off and desktop publishing software such as Aldus Pagemaker (unfortunately killed by Adobe) made extensive use of it. Threre was a time when a system known as "Lettraset" which were sheets of letters, symbols and complete passages were used by designers and Lorem Ipsum was of course used in it as well. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, claims he has undoubtable proof that the origin lies in "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. He discovered this by searching for the word consectetur in Latin texts. If he is right then it would make the origins of the text 2000 years old. As stated, it should look like any English text but of course herein lies a weakness when using it for international publcations. In German for example all nouns are capitalised and there is a reasonable amount of diacritics (Umlauts). Langua´ges such as Turkish or many of the Slavic languages also have large amounts of words with accents so for these languages a different text would need to be used. |
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