Ipsum Everywhere!

If Rosborough Technology’s lipServiceX (1.2) didn’t exist, someone would have built it. As an OS X Services menu item, it gives you quick and (almost) ubiquitous access to “lorem ipsum” no matter what application your using. A key combination makes this the quickest way to get some ipsum into your project.

Dashboard Widgets

While there isn’t exactly a plethora of widgets, the following ones cover all the ipsum bases:

• Dolor Sit Amet (small & quick)
• Cicero (gets the job done)
• Lorem Ipsum Widget (fancy)
• Corporate Ipsum – a humorous alternative to “lorem ipsum” (though it generates readable text, so it may distract proofers).

Editor-support

• TextMate has a built-in generator invoked via tab completion of the magic word.

Browser-based

• Dummy Lipsum – Firefox add-on
• A very nice “ipsum” bookmarklet generator

Online “lorem ipsum” generators

While not exactly a comprehensive list, these sites get the job done:

• lorem-ipsum.info – My favourite; multi-lingual (enables character set anomaly testing)
• lipsum.com – (the original?)

For the “do it yourself” folks

• Lorem Scriptsum – AppleScript script (with source and many options)
• The classic Perl module
• GTK+ GUI and Python module
• Ruby ipsum

Finally, this Joel on Software forum discussion is a great primer on the efficacy of even using standard “lorem ipsum” with some creative suggestions on alternatives. I’d be very interested in what tips and tools other TAB readers use to “get their ipsum on”, so drop a note in the comments!

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