in History, Technology | June 9th, 2026 Leave a Comment

Though sel­dom heard these days, the term “desk­top pub­lish­ing” once opened a great many eyes to the promise of the per­son­al com­put­er. It meant that one could cre­ate a pub­li­ca­tion with­out own­ing a press or con­tract­ing with an out­fit that did. Indeed, the whole process of writ­ing, design, and print­ing could take place on one’s desk, pro­vid­ed one had fur­nished it with the right com­put­er and acces­sories. From the mid-eight­ies through the ear­ly nineties, that meant an Apple Mac­in­tosh equipped with a Laser­Writer print­er and a copy of Aldus Page­Mak­er. For the first time, ordi­nary com­put­er users could cre­ate newslet­ters, brochures, and oth­er doc­u­ments assured that “what you see” onscreen is “what you get,” a fea­ture abbre­vi­at­ed as WYSIWYG.

That’s not the only strange-look­ing piece of text encoun­tered by ear­ly desk­top pub­lish­ers. Since Page­Mak­er enabled users to cre­ate a lay­out before even hav­ing the words to fill it, it need­ed dum­my text to occu­py the emp­ty spaces in order to pro­vide a rea­son­able approx­i­ma­tion of how the print­ed result would look. “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua,” that dum­my text begins, and it con­tin­ues as long as its defined field allows, repeat­ing itself as nec­es­sary. It may resem­ble Latin, but any­one with a decent under­stand­ing of that lan­guage won’t have to read much before notic­ing how odd­ly man­gled it is. So where did this mys­te­ri­ous text, still famil­iar to all lay­out edi­tors and graph­ic design­ers, actu­al­ly come from?