The variety and power of filler text generators continues to amaze. Here’s a few of my favorites from the past 12 months:
Meet The Ipsums (screenshot shown above) is an excellent overview of lorem ipsum generators on the web. Includes a preview function.
Lorem Gibson by David Weaver generates cyberpunk-flavored, William Gibson-inspired prose.
To Hollywood and television: Picksumipsum
has a unique approach, allowing you to choose a leading male actor (Clint Eastwood, Jim Carrey, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, amoung others) which then generates lines of script from their movies as filler text. I also really like RikerIpsum, which features the often rather… tortured lines of Commander Riker from Star Trek The Next Generation. A downside of the latter service is that it starts with a single sentence (although more can be added with a few clicks). In a lighter, breezy mood? Use Bob Ross Lipsum.
In previous typographic articles I’ve covered "filler text frameworks", for lack of a better term. Two more have come to my attention:
- Faker is a Lorem Ipsum generator for PHP
- Lorem.js is the equivalent for JavaScript and JQuery, with a dummy image generator built in.
A limitation of most filter text generators is that they only generate words using standard English characters scattered with punctuation. For true typographic recreation, filler text should include as many character forms as possible: accented characters, diacritical marks, quotes and more. Typable covers that very nicely, with support for multiple languages and handy filters.
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