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I know about the lipsum, blindtext and kantlipsum packages. What I would need is a variant creating dummy metadata: author name/affiliation, title, thanks etc. Does anyone know of anything like this? (Paragraphs provided by lipsum or kantlipsum are way too long, it seems from a glance at the source that blindtext has a similar problem.)

And a bonus would be fake jpgs with author photos, for testing journal styles with author picture & bio at the end;).

If the answer is no (which is quite probable), I might consider adding something like this to kantlipsum. What do you think, egreg?

Side note: if anyone knows what tags should accompany this question, please edit them. Does it make sense to have a "dummy-text" tag?

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    Packages such as blindtext, lipsum and kantlipsum want to be as class independent as possible. What class a \metadata command should be tailored to? For instance, article wants \thanks inside the \author field, amsart outside.
    – egreg
    Mar 7, 2012 at 20:50
  • Well, but you might have commands like \fakeauthor, generating a fake name, with an optional argument, which might be an index from a table with, say, 20 names (just like with [kant]lipsum). Then one might say, eg, \author{\fakeauthor[8]}.
    – mbork
    Mar 7, 2012 at 20:52
  • Also the syntax for authors is quite different in the various classes, unfortunately.
    – egreg
    Mar 7, 2012 at 21:07
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    @doncherry: thank you! You are probably right that it should be a separate package. Definitely, it is not too difficult - it is just a question of spending a few hours putting this code together. I hope I'll have another train trip within a few weeks, I could try to do it then. I was just curious whether there already is such an attempt.
    – mbork
    Mar 7, 2012 at 21:21
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    Paragraphs[...]are way too long How long should the paragraphs be? Did you try blindtext with option pangram and \blindtext[1] or \Blindtext[10][1] (10 paragraphs with 1 sentence). The pangram texts are quiet short. Don't forget to load babel (\usepackage[english]{babel})
    – knut
    Mar 7, 2012 at 22:21

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I cannot see how a lipsum like package for meta data would be useful. Packages like lipsum are useful for creating MWEs and testing new classes and packages. Since the meta data varies for each class, a blindmeta would only be useful for established classes. As @mbork says in his comment to the question maybe you want a package that supplies macros like \blindauthor. Since you would still need to code all the meta commands, I just don't see the advantage.

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  • Here's my use case: I'm preparing a style for journal. I'll have to show it to the editorial board, and for that I'll need sample ("fake") articles. The text can be created by lipsum, but I have to devise stupid names/addresses/emails/etc. myself each time...
    – mbork
    Mar 8, 2012 at 21:42

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