A new lorem ipsum?

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What the world needs is a convenient bit of extended text along the lines of Lorem Ipsum but as a show-off piece for typographic extras. For our purposes it should be in the language we intend to write in, since different languages have different problematic character-pairs and such things. Does anyone know of such a thing for English, or care to write one for all of us to share?

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Best I can give you is four words to show up the inadequacies of Arial’s spacing between ‘r’ and ‘n’, and ‘i’ and ‘l’:

millennium
smiling
marmalade
adornment

What was wrong with Lorem ipsum anyway? Cicero was quite a good chap…
:

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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What was wrong with Lorem ipsum anyway? Cicero was quite a good chap…
:

I was looking for something that might use (or not use, according to your settings) available ligatures, swash characters, and so forth in a single document that is dense in opportunities to use them, and that might be geared specifically to the new capabilities in Word 2010. (I like the version of Lorem that someone has slipped ‘und lookum like Greek to me’ in the middle of.)

You might enjoy This Link and others from it.

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Best I can give you is four words to show up the inadequacies of Arial’s spacing between ‘r’ and ‘n’, and ‘i’ and ‘l’:

millennium
smiling
marmalade
adornment

What was wrong with Lorem ipsum anyway? Cicero was quite a good chap…
:

Those words look absolutely fine to me in Word 2010 using Arial. What is supposed to be wrong with the spacing?

I’ve attached a screenshot of those words in 18 pt Arial, no kerning or anything at 240% Zoom.

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Best I can give you is four words to show up the inadequacies of Arial’s spacing between ‘r’ and ‘n’, and ‘i’ and ‘l’:

millennium
smiling
marmalade
adornment

What was wrong with Lorem ipsum anyway? Cicero was quite a good chap…
:

What’s even worse about Arial is this: (this gets ugly fast, and was a huge problem in one MMO (Lyra Studios’ “Underlight”) I used to be in)

Kelos KeIos
These two words look the same, but in fact….
Kelos KeIos This reveals that the second is a “spoofed” version of the first, using an uppercase I instead of the proper lowercase l. This was a very big problem in that game, because hackers were finding the names of popular players and spoofing them, then attempting to get them in trouble. It finally fell apart when some of the hackers made the mistake of showing up while the players whose names they’d spoofed showed up in the same room as the spoofer, and those responsible lost their accounts. In some cases, they were (and still are) banned for life.

As for the need for a new “space-filler” to replace the Lorem ipsum? I so rarely use the thing that I have no useful comment. Only a true and total loathing of anything Arial. For that matter, many sans serif fonts share a similar weakness, although not always with the same letters.

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What’s even worse about Arial is this: (this gets ugly fast, and was a huge problem in one MMO (Lyra Studios’ “Underlight”) I used to be in)

Kelos KeIos
These two words look the same, but in fact….
Kelos KeIos This reveals that the second is a “spoofed” version of the first, using an uppercase I instead of the proper lowercase l. This was a very big problem in that game, because hackers were finding the names of popular players and spoofing them, then attempting to get them in trouble. It finally fell apart when some of the hackers made the mistake of showing up while the players whose names they’d spoofed showed up in the same room as the spoofer, and those responsible lost their accounts. In some cases, they were (and still are) banned for life.

As for the need for a new “space-filler” to replace the Lorem ipsum? I so rarely use the thing that I have no useful comment. Only a true and total loathing of anything Arial. For that matter, many sans serif fonts share a similar weakness, although not always with the same letters.

The italicized ampersand is in many font sets far more elegant than the roman, and thus a single symbol might be used to beautify a sentence.

I wasn’t really trying for a ‘space filler’ so much as a quick brown fox substitute to show off optional features such as ligatures, which will vary by font in any case. It was a fun item and I may one day return to it.

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Yes, thanks – interesting link!

I won’t say that I thought a ligature was something to tie round an enemy’s neck, to strangle them!

The original purpose of Lorem was, of course, as a place-holder or a space-filler, and thus not really quite what you’re after…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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Nonsense. The original purpose was Cicero’s. To the extent that he was filling space depends entirely on how boring or otherwise his contemporaries found him to be, but if what he said has stuck around for this long it must have had some memorable quality. Printing was a long time in coming after Cicero.

Typographically, Lorem Ipsum is a standard text that lets you judge the so-called ‘colour’ of the text, and it is boring enough to those of us who only studied Latin for a year that our eyes glaze over (as they certainly must after the garotte) and we have a sense of the text as a whole rather than be swayed by the content. (Did you notice that a certain Microsoft logo is a ligature? And was it before or after viewing those pages? I confess I didn’t get it before the fact.)

Lorem Ipsum is too boring to pick up the differences among fonts (and their quirks) or to show off their strengths and weaknesses. Start serif text with an upper-case W to narrow the field in a hurry, get in a lower case ‘e’ and ‘g’ , and so on. Individual showoff pieces are made up to show off individual fonts, such as one with a lot of alternates, but I’d like to have text that is loaded with openings for the application of options (and the ability to appreciate them). In other words, Does it make a difference?, and Is it for better or for worse? Above all, which fonts are both practical and offer a maximum number of optional features?

In some spare moment we might see if we can come up with something, or more likely, find it online.

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Nonsense. The original purpose was Cicero’s.

Err, yes – he wrote (almost all of) it! But its later use was as a place-holder or space-filler…

BATcher

Plethora means a lot to me.

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This link might help if you aren’t aware of what is new and available in Office 2010. Interestingly enough, I realized on reviewing it that Word and Publisher 2010 themselves contain much or most of what I want.

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Another possibly-handy tool I forgot is the Character Map in System Tools in (Windows) accessories to view the character set for a given (active) font.

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You may also find http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/generator3 of interest.

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… along the lines of Lorem Ipsum but as a show-off piece for typographic extras.

Lorem Ipsum in publishing is used primarily as filler when creating layouts, exactly the reason I use it when developing Web sites.

But the typographic extras idea is not bad. You seem to know what you want – how about you create it?

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You seem to know what you want – how about you create it?

That is what I meant when I said ‘in some spare moment we might come up with something, with the ‘we’ implying that others might join in.

To this point my thoughts have led me to thinking of so-called ‘Pro’ fonts, which we don’t get to any degree with Windows or Office, and while I could concoct something from any number of Adobe fonts, readers would have to buy the font to put it to use. (It’s also a lot easier with an Apple, and we can all roll our eyes at that.) Many fonts have their own symbols, but I haven’t found all that many in the Windows collection which forces you to insert dingbats, which are different fonts. Surely there must be some there in those gigantic OpenType fonts, and I recall seeing charts with character numbers but not for windows. At present I’m going in circles so WE might see if we can come up with something.

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Two other online generators that I’ve saved links to:

http://www.blindtextgenerator.com/lorem-ipsum (my fav)

http://www.lipsum.com/ (many languages)

Hope it helps,

Andrew

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Two other online generators that I’ve saved links to:

http://www.blindtext…com/lorem-ipsum (my fav)

http://www.lipsum.com/ (many languages)

Hope it helps,

Andrew

If you like those you’ll loveGreeking Machine with its delightful collection of languages.

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Fun?

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Of course (without trying to hijack this thread), it depends what you are looking for in a font: Do you want something that “looks nice” or something that is “readable”? I recall a professor who pointed out to us (some years back now) that Times New Roman was (and is) specifically used in most print media because research showed that the curly Seriff tips of each letter/character cause the reader to read slower than, for example, the “pure” fonts such as Arial. The choice of Times New Roman is therefore designed to get readers to spend more time on each letter/word, thereby increasing retention of the overall content/message (How many text books do you recall not being printed using Times New Roman?). Anyway, enough of this non-geek speak from me. Let’s get back to what this forum is about!

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