When you’re designing and testing a new layout, it can be very helpful to use InDesign’s placeholder text feature to fill empty text frames with content and approximate the look of a finished page. And it’s easy enough to do: just put your cursor in a text frame (or select it with the Selection tool), and choose Type > Fill With Placeholder Text. By default, you get scrambled Latin lorem ipsum text, which you can then apply styles to.
But you’re not limited to lorem ipsum, as Anne-Marie Concepción shows in the InDesignSecrets video, Fun With Placeholder Text at lynda.com. In the video, Anne-Marie demonstrates how to choose a different language for placeholder text, as well as how to replace the default text content with any text of your choosing. She also highlights sources on the web for alternative (and fun) placeholder text content.
So check out the video and add some humor to your day with the likes of Batman Ipsum, Lebowski Ipsum, or Zombie Ipsum.
This article was last modified on March 5, 2025
This article was first published on January 2, 2015
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I love lorem ipsum, but every time I’ve used it the “client” doesn’t understand that it’s placeholder. I have to find “real” text… Rather disappointing.
Very cool. Unfortunately, when we design samples for the client, they want to see the actual text from the book we will be doing. So we import the actual unedited word file of the manuscript and do our sample that way.