Thanks!: Feugifacilisi etc.

[Petter Naess]

Many thanks to the 23 respondents (so far) who have enlightened me about
what is known as "placeholding text", latin-like nonsense used by
typesetters etc. to approximate the look of a printed page. For those
interested, you will find below an excerpt from the comp.fonts faq at

http://www.ora.com/homepages/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_36.htm#SEC144

The other text that I asked about, (beginning "Experieris non Dianam..."
was attributed by one respondent to Pliny the Younger.

Best regards, Petter Naess


What does `lorem ipsum dolor' mean?

`Lorem ipsum dolor' is the first part of a nonsense paragraph sometimes
used to demonstrate a font. It has been well
established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more
time reading the copy than looking at the font. The
``gibberish'' below is sufficiently like ordinary text to demonstrate a
font but doesn't distract the reader. Hopefully.

Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine, Volume 4
Number 2.:

[quote]

After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes
with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually
says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the
Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had
enlightening news:

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from
Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque
porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur,
adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself,
who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de
Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a
treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard
dummy text ever since some printed in the 1500s took
a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specimen book; it has
survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter
resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially
unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's
ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as
incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to
me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"

[unquote]


Petter Naess
Information Resource Center
U.S. Information Service  (USIS)
American Embassy
Drammensvn.18
0244 Oslo, Norway
phone 22562522
fax 22440436
email pnaess at usis.no