Though seldom heard these days, the term “desktop publishing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the personal computer. It meant that one could create a publication without owning a press or contracting with an outfit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writing, design, and printing could take place on one’s desk, provided one had furnished it with the right computer and accessories. From the mid-eighties through the early nineties, that meant an Apple Macintosh equipped with a LaserWriter printer and a copy of Aldus PageMaker. For the first time, ordinary computer users could create newsletters, brochures, and other documents assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a feature abbreviated as WYSIWYG.
That’s not the only strange-looking piece of text encountered by early desktop publishers. Since PageMaker enabled users to create a layout before even having the words to fill it, it needed dummy text to occupy the empty spaces in order to provide a reasonable approximation of how the printed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua,” that dummy text begins, and it continues as long as its defined field allows, repeating itself as necessary. It may resemble Latin, but anyone with a decent understanding of that language won’t have to read much before noticing how oddly mangled it is. So where did this mysterious text, still familiar to all layout editors and graphic designers, actually come from?
Pursuing an answer to that question in her new video above, Rabbit Hole creator Emily Zhang talks to individuals with relevant experience including Laura Perry, the former creative director at Aldus (a company named, incidentally, for the fifteenth-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius). It was she who first made Lorem ipsum digital, having previously used it as a wholly analog graphic designer in the form of rub-off Letraset sheets. She manually entered it straight into PageMaker off one such sheet, making occasional typos along the way. That was just another phase of transformation Lorem ipsum had been undergoing since Cicero’s words were first borrowed — and chopped up, and mixed with fragments of other languages — to create what became the industry-standard dummy text.
In the process of filling the gaps in this story, Zhang also talks to Richard McClintock, a professor of Latin long acknowledged as the premier expert on Lorem ipsum. Ultimately, she unearths a few truths that are new even to him, including an important one about the 1966 meeting at Letraset in which the idea was first floated of a single piece of dummy text that could substitute for most Western languages. It was James Mosley, the highly knowledgeable head librarian at the St. Bride Printing Library, who delivered Letraset the Cicero quotation originally known as Forum ipsum, “which had become garbled by more than one typesetter sitting at his bench since the mid-fifteen-hundreds.” Likely to remain in use as long as humanity puts words on pages — paper, digital, or whatever comes next — Lorem ipsum surely has a few more forms to take.
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The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became Used by Typesetters Everywhere
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
