| Rusty |
May 07, 2008 11:23 PM |
In case someone asks, the sample text in your testing above no se puede traducir, even though it may look like Latin at first glance. Here is the intriguing reason it is used:
'Lorem ipsum dolor' is the opening of a nonsensical paragraph sometimes used to demonstrate a font. It has been well established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at whatever else you're trying to demonstrate. The gibberish has the appearance of ordinary text, but doesn't distract the reader. At least, that is the hope.
Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine, Volume 4 Number 2. I corrected spelling and added the bold letters:
Quote:
After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:
"Lorem ipsum is Latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaissance.]
"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only five centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occasional 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"
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