If you've spent any time designing text for print or the web, you're probably familiar with "Lorem Ipsum." For the uninitiated, Lorem Ipsum refers to a passage of latin text from the Roman philosopher Cicero. For hundreds of years, type designers have used this passage as place-holder text in their designs.

Let's say you're working on the design for an anthology, but you don't yet know what texts are going to be included---you can use the text of Lorem Ipsum to get a visual sense of what a column of English-language text will look like on the page.

Lorem Ipsum is so ubiquitous, it's even included in Adobe InDesign; when you select "Fill with placeholder text" from the Type menu, what you get is an appropriate amount of Cicero's venerable essay on ethics.

A lot of designers have grown tired of Lorem Ipsum,  and others find the latin text distracting. This article, though, offers a roundup of online alternatives. I recently used one of these, Fillerati, for a literary project. Fillerati provides the designer with English text from literary works by writers such as Herman Melville and Jack London.

Other text generators are more whimsical. Samuel L. Ipsum, for example, uses quotes from movies featuring the actor Samuel L. Jackson (probaly not client-safe). And then there is one of my favorites, Hipster Ipsum, which will provide you with all the text you could ever want about PBR, fixies, and bands you've never heard of.