Everyone knows you can place the text cursor inside an empty text frame and choose Type > Fill with Placeholder Text. By default, you get some Latin text, reminiscent of “Lorum Ipsum.” And you might even know that you can customize the placeholder text with your own text.
But did you know you can hold down the Command/Ctrl key when you select Fill with Placeholder Text and get a dialog box asking what language you want to fill with? (This was new in CS6.)
When you choose a language and click OK, InDesign fills the frame with that language — changing the font to something suitable (something that contains those characters) along the way.
Nifty! But what if you want to combine these two tricks? You want to specify your own placeholder text and you want to do it in some other language? Well, a little birdy told me the trick: Create your own text file (no formatting), and save it in the UTF-16 encoding (that should be an option in your text editor) using one of the following names:
- PlaceHolder_GR.txt (Greek)
- PlaceHolder_CY.txt (Cyrillic)
- PlaceHolder_AR.txt (Arabic),
- PlaceHolder_HB.txt (Hebrew)
Unfortunately, this little birdy didn’t know the proper file names for Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. I’ve tried all the ones I can think of (JP, ja, etc.), but nothing works yet. If you can figure it out (assuming there is an answer, which there may not be), please let us know below!
Again, this placeholder text file needs to go into the Adobe InDesign application folder to work.
This article was last modified on October 13, 2025
This article was first published on August 9, 2012
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
