Lorem ipsum

[Jan Ivarsson]

Letraset may have found the phrase in any of a large number of treatises on typography.
There is much to read on the Internet - Google gives 19800 hits on "lorem ipsum", among others
www.neosplice.com/~ailanto/lorem.htm

Jan Ivarsson, TransEdit
Translator, Subtitler
Storgatan 2
SE-27231 Simrishamn, Sweden
Tel. +46 (0)414 106 20
Fax +46 (0)414 136 33
jan.ivarsson at transedit.st

 Original message:
       The February 16 Straight Dope column, available at

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010216.html

indicates that the Latin passage beginning "Lorem ipsum . . ." (and somewhat
incongruously known as "greek type") is not only a real classical quotation
but has been used as a type sample for centuries.  From Cecil's account:

>>This news came from Richard McClintock, a Latin professor turned
publications director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. Curious about
what the words meant, McClintock had looked up one of the more obscure ones,
consectetur, in a Latin dictionary. Going through the cites of the word in
classical literature, he found one that looked familiar. Aha! Lorem ipsum
was part of a passage from Cicero, specifically De finibus bonorum et
malorum, a treatise on the theory of ethics written in 45 BC. The original
reads, Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet,
consectetur, adipisci velit . . . ("There is no one who loves pain itself,
who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain . . .").

McClintock recalled having seen lorem ipsum in a book of early metal type
samples, which commonly used extracts from the classics. "What I find
remarkable," he told B&A, "is that this text has been the industry's
standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of
type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only
four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into
electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged." So much for the transitory
nature of content in the information age.<<

McClintock has forgotten where he found the old type sample, and the
contemporary use of the type specimen has been traced back only to Letraset
in the 1960s.  Any idea what Letraset's source may have been?

John Baker