Alternative to “Lorem Ipsum”

Question

Are there any alternative filler text packages besides lorem ipsum and blindtext? There seem to be a lot for the web, but I can't find any LaTeX packages and searching “alternatives to lorem ipsum” here does not return an answer.

Edit: An English language package would be helpful. So would a Spanish language package. "ptext" is Farsi/Persian, but my computer is not right to left enabled. I just wondered what alternatives might be out there in the TEx world considering the wealth of html alternatives.

Answer 1

One of the problems I had found with lipsum was that \lipsum provides formatting for its paragraphs (\pars, etc.). For a number of applications where you want to test a macro that manipulates plain text, it would be nice to be able to get lipsum text without the formatting.

So I contacted the author, and he was gracious enough to provide me with the following code (\singlelipsum{}), which provides just the text of a single lipsum paragraph, without any paragraph formatting.

\usepackage{lipsum}
\makeatletter
\newcommand\singlelipsum[1]{%
  \begingroup\let\lips@par\relax\csname lipsum@\@roman{#1}\endcsname
\endgroup }
\makeatother

Perhaps this would satisy your particular need, which was unstated in your question.

---

As noted in the comments to this answer, there is a \lipsum* macro (or alternately a [nopar] package option) which will suppress the terminating \par on lipsum paragraph outputs. HOWEVER, \lipsum* and \singlelipsum are not identical. Here is an MWE which shows it:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{censor}
\makeatletter
\long\def\blackout#1{%
  \def~{-}%
  \protected@edef\save@arg{#1}%
  \expandafter\censor@Block\save@arg\stringend\let~\sv@tilde}
\newcommand\singlelipsum[1]{%
  \begingroup\let\lips@par\relax\csname lipsum@\@roman{#1}\endcsname
\endgroup }
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\blackout{\singlelipsum{4}}
%\blackout{\lipsum*[4]}
\end{document}

As it is given, it compiles. But if you uncomment the second to last line, which is nominally similar to the third to last line, it breaks the code.

Answer 2

I have found, and started using the package \kantlipsum, which provides blindtext in a Kantian style. It is in English, about philosophy, and the paragraphs are rather long, which suits my needs just fine. A nice change from the same old\lipsum.

You use it the same way you would use the regular \lipsum-package:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{kantlipsum}
\begin{document}
\kant         % Produces seven paragraphs of blindtext
\kant[5]      % The fifth paragraph of the blindtext
\kant[23-34]  % produces paragraph 23 to 34
\end{document}  

It was produced by the Kant generator for Python by Mark Pilgrim, found in the book Dive into Python.

Here it is on CTAN. The documentation is here

Example text (first paragraph):

As any dedicated reader can clearly see, the Ideal of practical reason is a representation of, as far as I know, the things in themselves; as I have shown elsewhere, the phenomena should only be used as a canon for our understanding. The paralogisms of practical reason are what first give rise to the architectonic of practical reason. As will easily be shown in the next section, reason would thereby be made to contradict, in view of these considerations, the Ideal of practical reason, yet the manifold depends on the phenomena. Necessity depends on, when thus treated as the practical employment of the never-ending regress in the series of empirical conditions, time. Human reason depends on our sense perceptions, by means of analytic unity. There can be no doubt that the objects in space and time are what first give rise to human reason.

Answer 3

I find it very dull to keep seeing lipsum, also being (fake) latin it hyphenates really badly unless you switch hyphenation patterns, which can cause problems. I usually just add a few simple macros to generate text as required.

Some examples: here or here (where that last one injects a roman numeral counter so that the text and line breaking is less regular). Using such macros it is easy to tailor the text length to exactly what is needed (for example a line break happening at exactly the right place to show some effect, between paragraphs or on the last or first line to demonstrate controlling widows/orphans etc.

Answer 4

For Polish speakers, I highly recommend bredzenie designed by Marcin Wołiński during this year Tug@BachoTeX meeting.

An abstract from the doc :

Graphic designers often need some semantically neutral material to showcase a document layout. This problem is usually solved by using the classic pseudo-Latin text Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…. This text has been made available by Patrick Happel in the form of the LATEX package lipsum.sty.

However, languages differ in word lengths, characteristic frequency of letters and their n-grams, and so on. This means that a page of text in Latin will look different than a page of Polish. For the development of Polish document classes I have developed the package bredzenie, which provides access to several paragraphs of pseudo-Polish.

The text has been generated with Hidden Markov Models and, alternatively, Re- current Neural Networks trained on a corpus of Polish. Although the text makes absolutely no sense, it exhibits correct statistical characteristics, it “looks” Polish (in particular Polish hyphenation patterns are applicable).

Both useful and funny. Polish speakers, read its samples ! Here is a MWE for LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{polish}
\usepackage{bredzenie}
\begin{document}
\bredzenie{105-108}
\end{document}

And for pdflatex :

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[polish]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{bredzenie}
\begin{document}
\bredzenie{105-108}
\end{document}