Generating sample text automatically
By JT Justman
March 25, 2009
It’s a classic problem: you have a template to test, or a field constraint to test, and you need a large block of text. Designers and developers have come up with many ways to generate this sample data. My favorite is the classic ‘Lorem Ipsum’ Latin text used by typesetters for hundreds of years. For a long time I’ve just copy-and-pasted it, but I just happened to find a really cool Lorem Ipsum generator, complete with the ability to specify character length, paragraph number, word count, or even make a bulleted list. Simple and stylish, and easy for less technical collaborators to use. Hit the link for some fascinating history.
I’m sure many of you have your own methods. Share yours in the comments! Extra points for creative shell one-liners.
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