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The packages lipsum and blindtext work well enough to flesh-out and format LaTeX documents, but are these packages all that's available? The question to answer in this thread: how can I use newly generated web content in place of the usual text produced by more standard text generators?

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    Did you see kantlipsum?
    – egreg
    Apr 21, 2014 at 15:12
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    You can downloads whole books and fables from here gutenberg.org in pure text format. Then you can head (unix command or similar) or cut as much as you want and \input in your document.
    – alfC
    Apr 21, 2014 at 15:22
  • @egreg I like the idea of kantlipsum a lot, to use lipsum as a way to learn something new, we all know we read the lipsum text more than we should. It'd be great, later on, if I could link the lipsum to news headlines. As a way to format my documents and keep up with the world, or my Twitter world, all in one go.
    – Chernoff
    Apr 21, 2014 at 15:33
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    @Chernoff - of course you can, using \write18 (realistically immediate\write18). It's probably best to wrap your commands up in a shell script and execute with a single call, and don;t forget to run (pdf)latex --shell-escape to allow calling external code.
    – Chris H
    Apr 21, 2014 at 15:44
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    You can use wget also, if the website is friendly to it.
    – alfC
    Apr 21, 2014 at 16:00

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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In ConTeXt, you can use \input and \externalfigure to source any http:// resource as well. So, just pick your favourite online text and simply \input it. An example:

\starttext

\startasciimode
\input http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10947/pg10947.txt
\stopasciimode

\stoptext

which gives a 208 page document. The \startasciimode is to change the catcode of # so that it does not cause an error.

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    I wish LaTeX had this feature too
    – alfC
    Apr 22, 2014 at 3:43

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