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.

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,

Written by

Jono

on May 12, 2018

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