On the meaning of Lorem ipsum
Where have I seen this phrase before? I am sure that I remember it from somewhere…
Of course, now I remember! It is part of all those Latin “gibberish” that can be found in any web design template! You can even search Google for “lorem ipsum” and find all those (thousands of) sites that got uploaded in hurry and the creators forgot to replace everything in the pattern 🙂
But what does it mean? Why is it so widely used by every designer? Is it some secret inside joke?
I must admit that I never had the time to thoroughly think about those questions. Until I accidentally found today a web site dedicated to telling the story of “lorem ipsum” (and making some money while doing so, but who am I to judge?):
“… 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 … Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC …“
Quite an interesting set of facts and a nice story to tell in (geek) meals…
Silly Bits (and Bytes) 
> Latin “gibberish”
I’d like to present my lorem ipsum generator, besides Latin gibberish, it offers some interesting variants of dummy copy, eg utf-8 encoded charsets like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Greek, or diacritics.
> making some money while doing so
well, even gibberish generators don’t program themselves 🙂