OT: Japanese equivalent of lorem ipsum?

[Brian Watson]

I'm taking some classes on graphic design and layout, and am designing some brochures for a fictional Japanese publishing company.

I'm trying to find some dummy or placeholder text. In English, we use 'lorem ipsum...', based originally on a Ciceronic text, but is there an equivalent in Japanese?

--
Brian Watson
http://www.studiomomo.com
+1.604.395.4202 (home office), +1.425.246.7888 (cell), +1.425.484.6429 (fax)

[fumi...@gmail.com]

Have you checked the archives? I think I asked the same thing once
upon a time (今携帯ですので調べにくいけど).

Nora

--
Nora Stevens Heath <no...@fumizuki.com>
J-E translations: http://www.fumizuki.com/

[Marc Adler]

On Nov 9, 2007 10:33 PM, Brian Watson <brian....@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to find some dummy or placeholder text. In English, we use 'lorem
> ipsum...', based originally on a Ciceronic text, but is there an equivalent
> in Japanese?

In my experience, it's either English (one random sentence over and
over) or the Japanese text printed reversed (i.e., so you need a
mirror to read it).

--
Marc Adler
Austin, TX

Gauçac eztira multçutu, eta berretu behar mengoaric, eta premiaric gabe

[Nora Stevens Heath]

For your reference, and for what it's worth, here's the start of my
thread from April of this year:

http://honyaku-archive.org/posts/206955/

and here's the start of an even earlier thread from August of last year:

http://honyaku-archive.org/posts/195144/

Nora

[Mika Jz]

I wrote:
(いやあ、そうなんですよ。わかってくれてるじゃないですか。)

I noticed I used double-double(?) negatives which may have been
confusing to some who read Japanese using dictionaries. The correct
translation for the above is: "I totally agree!!!"

Mika Jarmusz @ YES, with triple exclamation marks.
Salem, Oregon USA

[mika jz]

昨日から行方不明のメールは
もう漂着前に遭難の可能性が色濃くなってきましたので、
内容を少し変えて送り直します。

アーカイブを「まとめて」検索できるのは、
ほんに、まことに便利ですね！
Ryanさん、ご苦労様でした。早速利用させていただいています。

古いスレッドで提案された
コンピュータ生成のランダムな日本語は、
デザインテンプレートなどの形で
広く日本人に見せるには不適切ではないでしょうか。

http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/_japanese#note
Please note that Japanese filler text is explicitly not suited for
the Japanese speakers for the same reason classic "Lorem Ipsum" style
filler text is not suited for the (few remaining) Latin speakers: They
actually understand it... and this is not intended.
(いやあ、そうなんですよ。わかってくれてるじゃないですか。)

文字を裏返す画像も面白いですし、
用途によっては役立ちそうですが、
実際に「文字」でないと役に立たない場合もあるので、
やはりlorem ipsumの日本語版がほしいところです。

http://www.tg.rim.or.jp/~hexane/ach/lbcs/lbcs4-08.htm
こちらの「化学の教科書」っぽい文章、
私などにはちょうどぴったり lorem ipsumの
　　　あの子守歌のような響きが．．．
読み手にもよるんでしょう、ね。

公表しない文書であれば、私は、
これは日本語のテストです。これは日本語のテストです。
これは日本語のテストです。これは日本語のテストです。
　　　を入れたりします。

ダミー文章ダミー文章ダミー文章
ダミー文章ダミー文章ダミー文章
　　　なども見られますが、これも冴えないですね。

ところで、
つれづれなるまゝに、日暮らし、硯にむかひて、心にうつりゆくよしなし事を、そこはかとなく書きつくれば、あやしうこそものぐるほしけれ、云々
．．．などいかがでしょうか。

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ghostbass/20070627/1182942520
(うーん、それはちょっとだめなんじゃ．．．)

Mika Jarmusz　＠再送信
Salem, Oregon USA

[Simon Currie]

Filler text として寿限無も見たことあります。こんなのとか：

寿限無、寿限無
五劫の擦り切れ
海砂利水魚の
水行末 雲来末 風来末
食う寝る処に住む処
やぶら小路の藪柑子
パイポパイポ パイポのシューリンガン
シューリンガンのグーリンダイ
グーリンダイのポンポコピーのポンポコナーの
長久命の長助

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AF%BF%E9%99%90%E7%84%A1

--
-------------------------
Currie.jp 翻訳サービス
クーリー才文
si...@currie.jp
070-6484-9854
http://www.currie.jp
-------------------------

[Doreen Simmons]

One small correction: the "lorem ipsum," text is nonsense. I suspect
that somebody fed a real Latin text into a computer which then randomly
jumbled it up.

On 2007/11/12, at 2:48, mika jz wrote:

> http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/_japanese#note
> Please note that Japanese filler text is explicitly not suited for
> the Japanese speakers for the same reason classic "Lorem Ipsum" style
> filler text is not suited for the (few remaining) Latin speakers: They
> actually understand it... and this is not intended.
> (いやあ、そうなんですよ。わかってくれてるじ

Doreen Simmons
jz8d...@asahi-net.or.jp

[S Zaveloff]

Doreen Simmons wrote:
> One small correction: the "lorem ipsum," text is nonsense. I suspect
> that somebody fed a real Latin text into a computer which then randomly
> jumbled it up.
>
>

It is not complete nonsense. See the following from www.lipsum.com:

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 Lorem Ipsum passage, used since the 1500s

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do
eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim
ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut
aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in
reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla
pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt
in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

Section 1.10.32 of "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero
in 45 BC

... dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit,
sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore
magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis
nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut
aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure
reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae
consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla
pariatur?"

--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven H. Zaveloff gua...@gmail.com
P.O. Box 200203 Tel: (512)219-7142
Austin, Texas 78720-0203 Fax: (512)233-2770
http://home.earthlink.net/~zaveloff/

Not by harming life does one become noble.
One is termed noble for being gentle to all living things.
-Dhammapada

[Doreen Simmons]

The second passage quoted by Steve Zaveloff does indeed make sense. The "lorem ipsum" passage does not,
and many of the words are not Latin at all.
So it is a corrupted Latin text not a randomly-generated one.

Doreen who was reading Cicero at 16 and has a Cambridge degree in Classics

Doreen Simmons
jz8d...@asahi-net.or.jp

[Mika Jz]

Simon's Japanese phrasing doesn't give us a clue as to whether his
suggestion was tongue-in-cheek or not.

Since this thread is in search of text that registers well with lorem
ipsum and not just any silly text, and because getting the right
register is not easy for non-native Japanese speakers as well as for us
NJS's translating from English into Japanese, let me follow up.

To those of us who are familiar with 寿限無寿限無, whether one can
actually recite it in its entirety or not (I used to admire those who
could as a kid), the text has a distinct flavor of ポンポコピーのポンポ
コナー (whatever that means <g>). Silly internal usage aside, it's
probably not suitable in a brochure template for a graphic designer.
Sorry if it was too obvious to mention. I couldn't tell.

Mika Jarmusz
Salem, Oregon USA

[Brian Watson]

Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I think what I am going to do is to use Wikipedia. Since the brochure is for a fake publishing company, there are plenty of articles on authors and writers there. And if I let my professor know the source, it's not plagiarism.

[Stuart Albert]

Has anyone just considered putting in the classic いろは sequence ad
infinitum? It seems to me that I've seen it used as similar filler in
other documents.

Stuart Albert

On Nov 12, 5:49 pm, "Brian Watson" <brian.wat...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks to everyone for their feedback. I think what I am going to do is to
> use Wikipedia. Since the brochure is for a fake publishing company, there
> are plenty of articles on authors and writers there. And if I let my
> professor know the source, it's not plagiarism.
>

> On Nov 12, 2007 11:11 AM, Mika Jz <mjz-l...@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > Simon's Japanese phrasing doesn't give us a clue as to whether his
> > suggestion was tongue-in-cheek or not.
>
> > Since this thread is in search of text that registers well with lorem
> > ipsum and not just any silly text, and because getting the right
> > register is not easy for non-native Japanese speakers as well as for us
> > NJS's translating from English into Japanese, let me follow up.
>
> > To those of us who are familiar with 寿限無寿限無, whether one can
> > actually recite it in its entirety or not (I used to admire those who
> > could as a kid), the text has a distinct flavor of ポンポコピーのポンポ
> > コナー (whatever that means <g>). Silly internal usage aside, it's
> > probably not suitable in a brochure template for a graphic designer.
> > Sorry if it was too obvious to mention. I couldn't tell.
>
> > Mika Jarmusz
> > Salem, Oregon USA
>
> --

> Brian Watsonhttp://www.studiomomo.com

[Brian Watson]

I was wondering if that suggestion would come up. I use iroha as both sample text to indicate which typefaces we use (because it is a pangram) and as a graphic device on other pages...

I guess I would find it unacceptable as true greeking because it didn't have the full range of character scripts. Yes, it can be written with kanji and kana, but not with both hiragana and katakana...

--
Brian Watson

[Alan Siegrist]

Brian Watson writes:

 

I guess I would find it unacceptable as true greeking because it didn't have the full range of character scripts. Yes, it can be written with kanji and kana, but not with both hiragana and katakana...

Perhaps I don’t completely understand. If you want all three scripts, couldn’t you do some sequence like いろは…イロハ…伊呂波? You can do as much or as little of the sequences as you like, repeated as many times as necessary.

 

Would this serve the purpose?

 

Regards,

 

Alan Siegrist

Orinda, CA, USA

[Brian Watson]

The purpose of greeking, of lorem ipsum, is to fool the eye into thinking it is seeing normal text, which, upon closer examination, is nonsensical, but appears natural enough on the page to give a sense of text would normally flow. Repetition of short phrases will lead to what are called 'rivers', lines of white space that flow down the column of text, and which are unnatural in normal work.

On Nov 12, 2007 3:48 PM, Alan Siegrist <AlanFS...@comcast.net> wrote:

Brian Watson writes:

 

I guess I would find it unacceptable as true greeking because it didn't have the full range of character scripts. Yes, it can be written with kanji and kana, but not with both hiragana and katakana...

Perhaps I don't completely understand. If you want all three scripts, couldn't you do some sequence like いろは…イロハ…伊呂波 ? You can do as much or as little of the sequences as you like, repeated as many times as necessary.

 

Would this serve the purpose?

 

Regards,

 

Alan Siegrist

Orinda , CA, USA

[Adam Rice]

This discussion reminds me of a paper I read on N-order randomized
text. Apparently the idea was invented by Claude Shannon (who also
gave us information theory). This is a Markov chain (or so I just
learned, through Google).

In a 0-order random text, letters are chosen at random. In a 1st-
order random text, letters are chosen based on their frequency of use
(given an existing text). In a 2nd-order random text, letters are
chosen based on the likelihood of following the previous letter (so
if the previous letter is "q", the algorithm would be strongly biased
to pick "u" next). 3rd-order looks at 3-letter strings, and so on. At
4th-order, the random text looks like the language of the source
text--that is, if you started with Italian, you get Italian
gibberish; if you started with English, you get English gibberish.
Around 8th-order, if you start with e.e. cummings, James Joyce, or
Faulkner as the source text, you get something that is recognizably a
product of that author (while not really meaning anything).

There may not be a canonical greeking text in Japanese, but it seems
that something like this would do nicely.

I did find this web gadget--The Shannonizer--which does this for you.
But it doesn't work on Japanese, since it looks for word boundaries.

http://www.nightgarden.com/shannon.htm

Adam Rice | adam...@8stars.org
Austin TX USA | http://www.8stars.org

[Chris Moore]

Well, I did have a little free time on my hands, and the thread was ongoing for long enough.  Here's a little webpage that works in Safari (and probably other browsers) that generates such text.  You may use it however you like.  If you don't like the text it generated the first time, try doing it a couple more times.  In the upper script section of the source it should be pretty easy to figure out if you'd like to customize it as well.  It's not meant to be pretty though, as I tried to just get it done in the shortest time possible. For those in need, I hope it proves useful (or at least a start).

Chris Moore

[Alan Siegrist]

Chris Moore writes:

| Here's a little webpage that works in Safari (and probably other browsers)
| that generates such text.

Hey, that's pretty clever. The output does resemble Japanese text at first
blush but is gibberish if you look carefully. I got it to work fine on IE
(after changing the page encoding to Unicode).

| In the upper script section of the source it should be pretty easy to
| figure out if you'd like to customize it as well.

Maybe I'll ask you some time (when I have to figure it out) where exactly
the source is. I tried my simple expedient of Page > View Source, but no
joy.

[Chris Moore]

Thanks Alan.

If you open the file in a plain text editor such as notepad instead of IE, you should see the raw html/script stuff.  The script that generates the text includes a list of characters to use grouped into kanji, hiragana, katakana, and punctuation, and a simple mechanism for making groups of certain kinds of characters come out more or less frequently than others (so you could tweak it to have longer combinations of kanji more frequently for a more technical document feel, or more kana and punctuation for a blog-ish feel), until it has generated at least the number of characters in the little box beside the button (default is 10,000).  The generated text can't be saved in IE, you'll have to copy and paste it into something else as well.  I've also confirmed that it works on Mozilla/Firefox/Camino (although it accidently includes tags initially in the text box, because I used xml style <tag/>s instead of <tag></tag> style tags for one or two items.

Chris Moore

[Neither]

Interesting discussion here. I have been looking for this for a while.
Chris, just wondering what happened to the link to the script you
mention. It seems to have disappeared from the post. Or am I doing
something wrong? I'm a little new here.

Thanks,
Neither

[Mika Jz]

That was a cool attachment.

Generally, I'd be cautious of an executable distributed via a mailing list, but seeing Chris Moore's introduction, I happily ran it :)

 

Now, some of you will notice I'm repeating myself, but let me put it this way:

 

The randomly generated Japanese text will tell the Japanese audience 2 things about your work:

 

1. It can display Japanese "characters".

2. You have no clue about the Japanese "language". 

(Even if you are a capable Japanese translator, that's the impression they will get from that filler text.)  Am I the only one insisting this?

 

I liked Brian's solution.  Take existing Japanese text from sources such as Wikipedia and paste it.

[Chris Moore]

Thanks Mika,

Brian's suggestion is a good one, if you don't mind the text giving emotional etc. cues that Lorem Ipsum is designed to be neutral of.  Lorem Ipsum's raison d'être is to only give visual cues related to design. With a little editing of punctuation, I think my script fulfills that need (text that looks like and flows as Japanese, in complete absence of meaning or emotion other than that implied by the design itself).  Of course, depending on your situation, and how strongly you feel about the importance of the neutrality of the text in your design template, you could go either way so it's good that both avenues are open.

Chris Moore

[Mika Jz]

Hi Chris M.,

 

I'm sure randomly generated text has its own place somewhere. 

And your program was impressive to me. 

 

With that said, statement below cannot be true:

<quote>

With a little editing of punctuation, I think my script fulfills that need (text that looks like and flows as Japanese, in complete absence of meaning or emotion other than that implied by the design itself).  

</quote>

 

I'd be curious to see how you can ever smooth over the text so that it NOT ONLY LOOK LIKE Japanese (the easy part) but __FLOWS__ as Japanese (the hard part; yet so EASY for the Japanese to instinctively spot the flaw and feel uncomfortable with it), in complete absence of meaning or emotion (like feeling uncomfortable).  If such thing is possible at all, then time spent making that happen will offset the ease of click of a button to generate the random text.

 

レイアウトのサンプルとして

以下のようなランダム生成の日本語テキストを使用したとき、

その会社（またはデザイナー）は日本の読者に対して

どのような印象を与えることになるでしょうか？

 

ゅつほのもぬそゅさめ「ら都派野「夜保すんらにせ差氏けねう氏日譜」差派、テルエナにえ区セータルナ擢瀬鵜都ふひや樹課譜課つ保阿氏区鵜留都知そちヨコイきなカネロ」もせ無雲みるのぬゃゅおちれ、へさひ、譜さなゅ

 

「日本語文字は表示できる、ってことか。」

「日本語ができるとは限らないけどさー。」

「ちょっとヤバイかもね、ここの会社。」

 

Why risk such impression?

If your audience is 日本語音痴, then they won't know the difference, and won't care.

[Brian Watson]

The thing is, Mika, that greeked text is used not for final products, but simply to convey a sense of layout for a work in progress. I don't know if Japanese design firms would ever do such a thing, but it is very common here in NA, to use greek text. Heck, QuarkXPress now lets you greek in Latin and Klingon!

[Mika Jz]

Hi Brian,

 

Thanks for chiming in, that sounds just fine :)

Different strokes for different audience.

Klingon for earthlings, too, by all means. <wink>

[Chris Moore]

Thanks Brian,

From Wikipedia: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum 

文書のレイアウトを決める際、テキストの入る部分はべた塗りや記号にするよりは実際の出来上がりに近いフォントによる文章を入れた方が完成時の姿を想像しやすい。しかし一方で、文章が入ると文書全体のデザインよりも文章の内容の方に意識が集中してしまう。そこで欧米などの出版業界やデザイン業界ではタイポグラフィやレイアウトにプレゼンテーションの焦点を当てるため、意味の全くない文字の羅列をテキスト部分に流し込む。

Again, if the text has any meaning people tend to focus on the content rather than presentation.  What context would my generated text be seen then? Only in a comparison of multiple design options, in which people should only be looking at the styles used and not the words. So how would I fix the bit that you copied in? Like this:

つほのもぬそゅさめ、ら都派野「夜保すんらにせ差氏けねう氏日譜」差派、テルエナにえ区セータルナ擢瀬鵜都ふひや樹課譜課つ保阿氏区鵜留都知そちヨコイきなカネロ、もせ無雲みるのぬゃゅおちれ、へさひ、譜さなゅ。

I made the sentence start with something other than a small kana, added a "。" at the end and made sure the "「」"s matched properly by changing the unmatched ones to a "、".

In the references section of the Japanese lorem ipsum wikipedia page it links to http://www.lorem-ipsum.info/_japanese which does a similar thing to my script except that it is almost completely katakana, which doesn't give a proper impression of a design's heaviness when filled with text that has a greater density of kanji. A person couldn't look at the *whole* of a page and get a good feel for what it would look like with real text on it. Here's a sample from lorem-ipsum.info:

セシビリティ とセマンティック アクセ ネッ リア式会 さぁはじ よる 併団イ, ンツア らすかる バジョン ンテ をマ バジョン の再形式化 シビリティ 拡なマ ユザエ ウェ ンツアクセシ ウェブコンテン, オサリングツ レイティングサ プラニングリサチ クほ 拡なマ プロファイル ルにするために どら トワク, の徴 キュメント イドライン 拡張可, 展久 わった プロトコル テストスイト レイテリング ィに コンテン ンタネット協会 健二仕, 寛会 ウェブア ンツアクセシ オサリングツル のため, クほ シン可な ブコンテ プロセスド ラベラ

As you can see, it also uses latin hyphens and single-byte spaces.  It also contains snippets of words that draw me into the text itself rather than its presentation and give it a perhaps unintended implied context.  

I suppose if I wanted to make my script more clear that it was filler text I could make it output kanji/kana in the same frequency but loop through aiueo order instead of picking a random character from the set, while periodically inserting smarter punctuation. I'll see how much free time I get in the next couple days. <g>

A friend of mine (who happens to live in my attic) is a professional graphic designer. I've seen him do his stuff, and had him explain some of this to me before.  Brian mentioned that he's taking a graphic design course of some kind, and I'm sure people within the field will appreciate the need for good garbledygook.  Perhaps a good third option would be to take an English wikipedia page and throw it through Google's dog drinker, although whether it can come up with as many horse puns as Franzi remains to be seen. 

 

Have a good one!

Chris Moore

[Shaney Crawford]

Hi there,

I think the key is that "Lorem Ipsum" is not English, but is written
with the same fonts as English, so the average English reader (or
client) will not attach any particular emotion to the text. A text
written in gibberish English, however, might cause English clients to
focus on the text rather than the design.

Since no other language besides Japanese can be written in Japanese,
there is no way around this problem. You either have to take your
chances with a gibberish document and hope that the client will get
that you are "greeking the Japanese", or use an actual Japanese text
of some sort. I imagine the choice depends on how confident you are
that your client will understand what you are doing, and how important
it is for the client to focus on the design rather than the text.

By the way, does anyone know why we call it "greeking" when we
generally use a Latin text? Did greeking originally refer to
something illegible that was used as a place holder (like a series of
dashes and dots)?

Shaney.

[Adam Rice]

Chris Moore wrote:

> Again, if the text has any meaning people tend to focus on the
> content rather than presentation.

This really does happen. Designers will show off a mockup with
meaningful dummy text, and the client will get hung up on the text.

> I suppose if I wanted to make my script more clear that it was
> filler text I could make it output kanji/kana in the same frequency
> but loop through aiueo order instead of picking a random character
> from the set, while periodically inserting smarter punctuation.

What you sent out was perfectly respectable--especially for a first
pass done in your free time. If you could insert a 禁則処理
algorithm, you'd avoid all the obvious problems. Adapting the Nth-
order randomizations that I wrote about upthread might result in even
more convincing-looking random text, although it would need a seed
text rather than hard-coded arrays of characters.

[Brian Watson]

If I remember my history correctly, it was indeed because Greek text was used.

It's all Greek to me!

[Chris Moore]

Thanks Adam,

Here's revision two, with a little extra refactoring of the code (singleton inheritance hack by assigning an object's __proto__ property) which shouldn't disrupt its use on all major browsers and includes slightly smarter punctuation. It also has a checkbox to randomly disperse phrases noting that it is placeholder text throughout (including the beginning), for those so inclined. <g>  Again, this isn't necessarily definitive, but for those wanting some meaningless filler text I hope that it serves its purpose.  N-th order algorithm development is left as an exercise to the reader ;-)

HTH

Chris Moore

[Paul Cowan]

On 15 Nov 2007, at 16h53, Chris Moore wrote:

> except that it is almost completely katakana, which doesn't give a
> proper impression of a design's heaviness when filled with text
> that has a greater density of kanji. A person couldn't look at the
> *whole* of a page and get a good feel for what it would look like
> with real text on it.

This BTW is referred to as the page colour.

bye,

P. (^_^)

---

mailto:po...@mac.com

Ma, quando si acquista stati in una provincia disforme di lingua, di
costumi e di ordini, qui sono le difficultà. - Niccolò Machiavelli

[Peter Durfee]

On 07.11.16 8:16 AM, "Adam Rice" <adam...@8stars.org> wrote:

> Chris Moore wrote:
>
>> Again, if the text has any meaning people tend to focus on the
>> content rather than presentation.
>
> This really does happen. Designers will show off a mockup with
> meaningful dummy text, and the client will get hung up on the text.

There are also some designers (I read a good piece on this once, maybe on A
List Apart? Zeldman?) who note that if you show endless samples of lorem
ipsum to people, they will cease looking at the text bits at all, and end up
with no sense whatsoever of how it actually feels to read text within the
design. That's a problem. The client gets excited about the pretty colors,
signs off on the thing, and only later realizes how difficult it is to read
120-character lines of 8-point text.

Getting people to focus on content is the end purpose of the website or
print pub; not showing off your CSS or InDesign skills. There's no reason to
remove the step or "actually reading words on the page" from the design
process IMO.

--
Peter Durfee
du...@gol.com
Tokyo

[Dan Burgess]

Re "greeking", there are two usages.
Several years ago when DTP was in its infancy and computers had much
less video RAM to work with, and monitors could not display extremely
small text, "greeking" was used to indicate blocks of text at smaller
point sizes.
Wikipedia entry on greeking:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking

And an interesting site on the history of lorem ipsum text, and a text
generator:
http://www.lipsum.com/

Brian Watson wrote:
> If I remember my history correctly, it was indeed because Greek text was
> used.

Shaney Crawford wrote:
> > By the way, does anyone know why we call it "greeking" when we
> > generally use a Latin text?

- Dan Burgess in Yokohama

-----------------------
Dan Burgess
canuck....@gmail.com

[Brian Watson]

I've yet to meet a designer who would assume a final go just because a rough with greeked text was approved...

There are usually several steps involved. Once the design is settled, the client will have another chance (or several) to approve the final content as well...

[Darren Cook]

> I've yet to meet a designer who would assume a final go just because a rough
> with greeked text was approved...
>
> There are usually several steps involved. Once the design is settled, the
> client will have another chance (or several) to approve the final content as
> well...

Though of course try not to give them too many such chances. E.g.:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071018.html

Darren

[Chris Moore]

On 2007/11/16, at 12:06, Darren Cook wrote:

Though of course try not to give them too many such chances. E.g.:
http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20071018.html

All the more amusing because Dilbert is an engineer and not a designer, so presumably the page in question is technical. 

Chris Moore

[J.Lazo]

Very interesting thread.
I liked Simon's suggestion, but I agree with Mika that maybe it's too
familiar. Perhaps something more esoteric would work?
Here's a nagauta from the manyoshi:

真葛(まくず)延(は)ふ　春日の山は　打ち靡く　春さりゆくと
山の辺(へ)に　霞たな引き　高圓(たかまと)に　鴬鳴きぬ
物部(もののふ)の　八十伴男(やそとものを)は　雁が音の　来継ぎこの頃
かく継ぎて　常にありせば　友並(な)めて　遊ばむものを
馬並めて　行かまし里を　待ちがてに　吾(あ)がせし春を
かけまくも　あやに畏し　言はまくも　忌々(ゆゆ)しからむと
あらかじめ　かねて知りせば　千鳥鳴く　その佐保川に
石(いそ)に生ふる　菅の根採りて　偲(しぬ)ふ草　祓ひてましを
行く水に　禊(みそ)ぎてましを　大王の　命畏み
百敷の　大宮人の　玉ほこの　道にも出でず　恋ふるこの頃

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~sg2h-ymst/manyok/manyo_k.html

While it's not nonsensicle like 寿限無, the combination of classical
orthography, grammar and terms would likely throw most people off of
the scent while still encouraging them to follow the trail as it were.
Could this possibly work, sans the spaces, breaks and furigana?

On a different note, would it be considered tactless to use classical
literature for dummy text? Any thoughts?

Best,
James

[Mika Jz]

James Lazo wrote:
> While it's not nonsensicle like 寿限無, the combination of classical
> orthography, grammar and terms would likely throw most people off of
> the scent while still encouraging them to follow the trail as it were.

それ、いいと思いますよ。
子供向けなどのよっぽど外れたテーマでなければ、
万葉集などは壁紙的な感覚で、
かなり広く使えるのではないでしょうか。

このスレッドの最初の方で、
徒然草の引用を案として出しておきましたが、
ほかにも使える古文はありそうですね。

[J.Lazo]

On Nov 16, 3:46 pm, "Mika Jz" <mjz-l...@comcast.net> wrote:

> このスレッドの最初の方で、
> 徒然草の引用を案として出しておきましたが、
> ほかにも使える古文はありそうですね。

失礼しました！読み飛ばしてしまいました･･･

[Ryan Ginstrom]

> [mailto:hon...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Mika Jz
> それ、いいと思いますよ。

Or if you want something tantalizing similar to Japanese, but not quite, how
about some Okinawan?

Here's the first part of デンサー節 with lines glommed together.

うちなあぬ言葉んかしからぬうちなぐち子孫に継じ行かねなゆみ
うちなぐち語てぃ童ん達に聞かち言ちゃいはんちゃいなゆしどぅ我ねえ願ゆる
おもさうし琉歌組踊民謡あまん世からうやふじぬ ちゅくたる言葉
物語作てぃうちなぐちし書ち留みてぃ世間御真人ぬ肝ぬなぐさみなゆさ

Regards,
Ryan

--
Ryan Ginstrom
trans...@ginstrom.com
http://ginstrom.com/

[大工]

Ryan Ginstrom さんが 17:46 7/11/16 +0900 に書いたメッセージの件：

> Or if you want something tantalizing similar to Japanese, but not quite, how
> about some Okinawan?

I think you are on to something...! And we have even more obscure items of this kind at hand, from the period where the Yaeyama people generally did not see themselves as Ryukyuans or Okinawans yet. ;-)

Regards: Hendrik

--

* 南風言語業 *
http://www.paikaji-translation.com/

--