Although rarely heard these days, the term “desktop publishing” once opened many people’s eyes to the possibilities of personal computers. It meant that publications could be produced without having to own a printing press or contract with a printing company. In fact, the entire writing, designing, and printing process can be done at your desk if you have the right computer and accessories. From the mid-’80s to the early ’90s, that meant an Apple Macintosh with a LaserWriter printer and a copy of Aldus PageMaker. For the first time, ordinary computer users can create newsletters, brochures, and other documents that ensure that what you see on your screen is what you get. This feature is abbreviated as WYSIWYG.
This wasn’t the only strange-looking text that early desktop publishers saw. Because PageMaker allows you to create a layout before you type a word, we needed dummy text to fill in the empty spaces to give you a good idea of what the printed result would look like. The dummy text begins, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod Tempor incididunt ut Labore et dolore magna aliqua”, continues as long as the defined fields allow, and repeats as necessary. It may look similar to Latin, but anyone with some understanding of the language will notice how strangely confusing it is without much reading. So where did this mysterious text, still familiar to every layout editor and graphic designer, actually come from?
Pursuing the answer to that question within her new video onRabbit Hole creator Emily Chan speaks with people with relevant experience, including Laura Perry, former creative director at Aldus (the company is named after the 15th-century Venetian printer Aldus Manutius, by the way). She was the first to make it Lorem Ipsum I used to use it in the form of off-the-shelf Letraset sheets as a fully analog graphic designer. She manually entered such sheets directly into PageMaker, making occasional typos along the way. It was just the next step in the transformation. Lorem Ipsum Cicero’s words have been studied ever since they were first borrowed, chopped up and mixed with fragments of other languages to create what became the industry’s standard dummy text.
In the process of filling in the gaps in this story, Zhang also said: Richard McClintock professor of Latin who has long been recognized as the foremost expert on Lorem Ipsum. Eventually she reveals some truths that are new even to him. Among them is an important truth about the 1966 Letraset meeting where the idea of a single dummy text to replace most Western languages first emerged. It was James Mosley, the highly knowledgeable head librarian of St. Bride’s Printing Library, who provided Letraset, originally known as “Cicero Quotations.” forum ipsum“It has been garbled by multiple typesetters sitting on benches since the mid-1500s.” It will likely continue to be used as long as humans write on pages, whether on paper, digitally, or whatever comes next. Lorem Ipsum Certainly, it should take some more form.
Related content:
The story of Lorem Ipsum: how Cicero’s scrambled text came to be used by typesetters everywhere.
Explore the new digital edition of Type of printingthe authoritative history of printing and typography since 1922.
How magazine pages were created before computers: Veteran london book reviews Demonstrates a meticulous manual process
The End of an Era: A Short Film About the Last Days of Hot Metal Phototypesetting in New York times (1978)
Why learn Latin?: 5 videos that make a convincing case that a “dead language” is an “eternal language”
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
