Customizing InDesign’s Placeholder Text

Tired of Lorem Ipsum for your placeholder text? Or, rather, InDesign’s randomly generated “Latin” text? I use scare quotes because I haven’t independently verified its, um, Latinness. Regardless of origin, it sure isn’t English (or even your own native tongue), so unless you’re actually writing in Latin, it tends to fall short. One purpose of placeholder text is to get a feel for text flow, including hyphenation. Having Latin text in a paragraph with another language indicated in the Character panel, means InDesign doesn’t really know what to do with it. Luckily, you can replace that text with content you can actually read.

InDesign's built-in placeholder text.

InDesign’s built-in placeholder text.

First, you need to find text that you want to fill your documents with. For me, I tend to head out to Project Gutenberg to find something literarily juicy and copyright-free. If you want something that won’t have your readers suddenly engrossed in its content, you might try a lorem ipsum-type generator. From bacon to Doctor Who to gangsta, check out Meet the Ipsums for several different placeholder text generators. If you want, you could even use text from your client’s company files or even assemble a smattering of your own company’s jargon.

A sample of placeholder text.

A sample of placeholder text.

Once you have your text copied, paste it into your favorite text editor, and change it to plain text. Once you have a plain text version with as much text as you’d like to have—I generally take six to 16 paragraphs—save it with the name “placeholder” (no quotes, all lowercase) with the .txt extension. Take that newly-minted file and drop it into the same folder where your copy of InDesign resides, no need to re-start InDesign.

Place the file "placeholder.txt" in the same folder as InDesign.

Place the file “placeholder.txt” in the same folder as InDesign.

Now that you’ve got that shiny new placeholder text ready to work for you, you might consider making a custom keyboard shortcut for it. After all, the command to Fill with Placeholder Text is ALL THE WAY DOWN AT THE BOTTOM of the Text menu (oh, the humanity!). To set up your own shortcut, just go to the Edit menu, and choose Keyboard Shortcuts (also at the end of the menu). Choose Type Menu from the Product Area pull-down menu, find Fill with Placeholder Text in the list, enter a unique shortcut in the New Shortcut field, then hit OK.

Now, when you need placeholder text, hold the mumbo jumbo, just invoke your shortcut and your snippet of Hamlet, The Bible, or quotes from The Big Lebowski will magically fill your text frame. Oh, and if the formatting gets lost—lack of paragraph returns seem to be a persistent issue—you’ll need to take an extra couple of steps. Place all of your text into frames in InDesign and add returns or any other text formatting, then select all of the text and export to RTF format. Use that file to create the plain text “placeholder.txt” file.

REVIEW:

  • Find text to use.
  • Create a plain text version of the text.
  • Save to a file called placeholder.txt.
  • Put that file in the same folder as the InDesign application.
  • Create a custom keyboard shortcut, if needed.
Erica Gamet has been involved in the graphics industry for over 35 years. She is a speaker, writer, trainer, and content creator focusing on Adobe InDesign, Apple Keynote, and varied production topics. She is a regular presenter at CreativePro Week, regular contributor to CreativePro Magazine, and has spoken at Canada’s ebookcraft, Adobe MAX, and Making Design in Oslo, Norway. Find Erica online at the CreativePro YouTube channel, CreativeLive.com and through her own YouTube channel. When she isn’t at her computer she’s probably daydreaming about travel or living in a Nordic noir landscape.

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