What is Lorem Ipsum?
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting
industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since
the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to
make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also
the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was
popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem
Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus
PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum. SMO Course
Why do we use it?
It is a long established
fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when
looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a
more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here,
content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing
packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text,
and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their
infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident,
sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
Where does it come from?
Contrary to popular
belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of
classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard
McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up
one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage,
and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the
undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of
"de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by
Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very
popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, "Lorem
ipsum dolor sit amet..", comes from a line in section 1.10.32.
The standard chunk of
Lorem Ipsum used since the 1500s is reproduced below for those interested.
Sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" by
Cicero are also reproduced in their exact original form, accompanied by English
versions from the 1914 translation by H. Rackham.
Where can I get some?
There are many
variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered
alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't
look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem
Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the
middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat
predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the
Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful
of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable.
The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected
humour, or non-characteristic words etc.
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