Skip to content

八八吧 · 88 Bar
A group blog about Chinese tech, media and design

Typography Design

The Hunt for a Chinese Lorem Ipsum

Posted on by Jason Li
Lorem ipsum according to Wikipedia:
In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a filler text commonly used to
demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing
meaningful content with placeholder text allows viewers to focus on graphic aspects such
as font, typography, and page layout without being distracted by the content. It also reduces
the need for the designer to come up with meaningful text, as they can instead use quickly-
generated lorem ipsum.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a
1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it
nonsensical, improper Latin.

So what’s the Chinese equivalent?

It seems there’s no agreed upon standard text, so here’s what I found:
• The most commonly referenced one is Richy Li’s Chinese Lorem Ipsum, which spouts dummy
text of various word counts.
• The most fully-featured is Handino’s Moretext, which allows you to choose texts based on
Chinese poets, Twitter or the Apple Daily newspaper.
• But both of those are traditional Chinese.* The only simplified Chinese one I’ve found is from
tech shop 关于电商开源.
• One Quora user even said his “Chinese graphic designer” friend just pastes one sentence over
and over again, which is ridiculous.
* Of course, you can also machine translate traditional Chinese to simplified, but that would make you
do one extra step of work!

Published by
◆ Jason Li is an independent designer, artist and educator. Once upon a time, he studied engineering
and ran a news site about fan translations of video games.
View all posts by Jason Li
Categories ▸ Typography DesignTags ▸ chinese lorem ipsum ▸ design ▸ lorem ipsum ▸ typesetting ▸
typography

Leave a Reply
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Post navigation
Previous post
Previous post Occupy Hong Kong one year later: the coming colonization of cyberspace
Next post
Next post An underground temple for books in Chengdu

88 Bar is a group blog about technology, media and design in the Greater China region. More about us.
Follow us
Twitter
Facebook

RSS

Sign up for our newsletter

Featured columns
• Ethnography of Tech
• China Meme Report
• Multi Entry
• Chinese Comics Review
• Starting Up in Shenzhen
• Typography Design
• State Capitalism Watch
• Virtual China Archives

Keyword search

Search for:

Our authors
Jason Li is an independent designer, artist and educator. Once upon a time, he studied engineering and
ran a news site about fan translations of video games.
Tricia Wang observes how technology makes us human. Her ethnographic research follows youth and
migrants as they process information and desire, remaking cities and rural areas.
Jin Ge aka Jingle is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and NGO organizer based in Shanghai. Jin does
sociological research and produces multi-media content on the subjects of Internet subcultures and
grass-root organizations in China. He is currently a senior design researcher at IDEO.
An Xiao Mina is a design strategist, new media artist and digital community builder in the Pearl River
Delta. She uses technology to build and empower communities through design and artistic expression.
Graham Webster is a Beijing-based writer and analyst working at the intersection of politics, history,
and information technology in China and East Asia. He believes technology and information design can
reveal some of what what wonkdom can’t.
Christina Xu is an observer and organizer of communities, both online and off-. She is particularly
interested in youth subcultures, cultural translation & syncretism, and user reappropriations of
technology.
Lyn Jeffery is a cultural anthropologist and researcher at the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit group
in Palo Alto, California. She studies new experiences enabled by connective technologies.
Contact us.

Archives

Copyright 88-bar.com. All rights reserved unless otherwise stated.

Proudly powered by Vanilla Milkshake and Wordpress