Use Your Own Placeholder Text in InDesign

Mark wrote:

I was wondering if there was a way to replace the “Fill with placeholder text” from the latin gibberish to another English babble.  I know in QuarkXPress they give you different options for Jabberwocky. Can InDesign be customized to replace the fill Placeholder text from it’s default setting?

We’ve gotten three separate questions about placeholder text in the last week, so obviously it’s time to revisit this subject! We mentioned the trick for creating custom placeholder text back in Episode 46, but it’s not always easy to find solutions in the middle of a podcast transcript. So:

To make your own custom placeholder text, just create any text file (no formatting, just a Text Only file). Save it with the name “placeholder.txt” and put it in the InDesign application folder. You don’t even need to restart the program… next time you use Fill with Placeholder Text, it will use that text instead.

We also got a report from someone else that when they try this, InDesign ignores the paragraph returns in the text file and just strings all the text together. This sounds like it may be some kind of text encoding issue. One solution may be to import the text file into InDesign, then use File > Export to save the text out again as Text Only. That has always worked for me.

Of course, no discussion of placeholder text and QX’s Jabberwocky feature would be complete without a mention of the excellent ChatterGoofy plug-in from Rorohiko (lightningbrain.com). This free plug-in lets you use Jabberwocky sets in InDesign. They say they haven’t updated it to create your own languages yet, though I hope they get around to that soon, as I always loved Jabberwocky in XPress and miss that ability in InDesign.