When you have a cursor in a text frame in InDesign, you can choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text to fill the text frame with "lorem ipsum" nonsense text. This can be useful if you need to format some text before the actual text is available.
If you'd prefer text other than the standard "lorem ipsum", you have some options:
1. The Greek Machine lets you specify what sort of text you want (Latin, marketing speak, hillbilly, pseudo German, and more) and then it produces text you can copy and paste into InDesign or any other program. The Lorem Ipsum Generator offers Greek, Russian, Arabic, Esperanto and many other variations.
2. g-design has created a Lorem Ipsum Widget for the Macintosh.
3. Rorohiko has created a free InDesign plug-in called Lightning Brain ChatterGoofy, which creates several different types of nonsense text right in InDesign.
4. You can create a text file named "placeholder.txt" and put it in the top level of your InDesign CS2 or CS3 application folder. The next time that you choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text, the text from your placeholder.txt file will be used.
But wait, there's more! The Lorem Ipsum Generator at http://www.designerstoolbox.com/
ReplyDeletedesignresources/greek/ gives you the option of generating lists or bulleted lists of Lorem Ipsum text. Very handy!
Thanks. I use "All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy."...
ReplyDeleteIt's fun :)
-Matt
In Illustrator you can use a text file and an action to quickly get placeholder text into a document.
ReplyDelete1. Create a text file, save it on your hdd somewhere
2. Create an action in Illustrator, give it a shortcut (like F5)
3. While the action is recording, navigate to 'File > Place' and locate your placeholder.txt file
4. Press stop on the action.
If you run the action it will place the text in a box in the centre of your artboard. If you click with a text cursor onto your document, or draw a text box it will populate that with the text.