285 Replace formatted text with lorem ipsum

- [Instructor] I think it's time to revisit lorem ipsum. I think that we have done one video at least on placeholder text. And I want to update what is the state of placeholder text in InDesign, and show you this very cool new script that will allow you to replace formatted text with lorem ipsum without losing the formatted text. It's a free script, and I'll show you how to get it in this video. First, let's review placeholder text. I'm looking at a frame right here where I want to put in sample text for a letter to the editor, and I already have the style set for this text frame.

If I go to the type menu and I choose fill with placeholder text, I get the good old lorem ipsum that, you know, gets installed automatically. It's using the correct formatting, and the type is kind of boring, though, I think. So, you probably already know that, in recent versions of InDesign, I think since CS six and later, you can hold down the command or control key when you choose the type menu, and when you choose fill with placeholder text, as long as you're still holding down that modifier key, you can choose different languages, which is kind of fun.

So I could fill this with Arabic, for example, if I wanted to, so it reads right to left. That would really be a lot of fun for people who don't speak Arabic. I'm going to undo. But what about different lorem ipsum texts itself? What if you are bored with that fake Latin stuff? There is this great website called Meet the Ipsums. (laughs) And it essentially just has a ton of different kinds of ipsums. So you can scroll through, and I think that the person who put this site together, I don't know anything about them, has just linked to various places where you can get like zombie ipsum, "De braaaiiiins," hipster ipsum, and so on.

Let's say that we want to use cat ipsum. You follow the link, you're brought to this site. All the sites are different, like I said, but normally, you can set how many paragraphs, and you probably want to set a lot. And then I guess we put Make Muffins. And it gives you the text. So you can select all the text, sometimes you have to select it yourself, copy it, and then, what I usually do is I'll go to InDesign and create a new document with a blank text frame, paste it in there, and sometimes I want to like add more returns, and so on.

I'll just do a couple. Sometimes they come in already nicely formatted with returns, this one doesn't look like it did. And then you export this to plain text. Go to file and choose export, and you want to export it to plain text, so under format, choose text only. Now here's the thing. You want to save it in a text file called placeholder.text, and save it in your InDesign folder. And this trick works with, I think, any version of InDesign since CS two onward. If InDesign sees a plain text file called placeholder.text, named exactly that, all lowercase, then it will use the text from that when you choose fill with placeholder text.

Let's go ahead and give it a try. I'll click okay. And you want to choose whatever is the default encoding for your platform. I'm on a Mac, so I'll choose that. And now we'll go back to this, and we'll fill it with placeholder text. Type, fill with placeholder text, and now we get kitty text (laughing), which I think is pretty funny. All right, what about that other option that I talked about in the beginning of this video, where you can replace existing text with lorem ipsum without losing the formatting? And I find I really need to use that a lot, like I'll take an old document, and I want to put it in my portfolio, for example, but it has, you know, some private NDA text from the client.

The client probably doesn't want their information floating around on my website or being sent out in PDFs. I would like to replace their text with lorem ipsum text, but I don't want to have to reformat everything, and that's what would happen if I selected all this text, deleted it, and replaced it with placeholder text. I'd have to reformat the whole thing. Well I found this fantastic free script called LoremIpsum-izer, which I've installed here. And if you want to get it, I'm going to upload it to InDesign Secrets.

If you go to InDesignSecrets.com, you'll see we have a resources drop down. Choose the one that says Plug-Ins and Scripts. I'm going to make a new category here called From Lynda.com videos, and we'll put the scripts that we mention, if they're not available on the developer's website, we'll put them here so you can download them right from here. I could not find the developer of this website. I think that somebody posted it in a forum a while ago, and I just grabbed it and saved it. Anyway, so let's go back to InDesign. And I've installed the script, as I said, and scripts are easy to install, easy to run, we have many videos and blog posts about that.

But here it is, called LoremIpsum-izer.jsx, and all you need to do is click inside the story or frame in which you want to run the script, I don't think it does an entire document. So I want it to run in this story, which if I select all, you can it's these two frames. And then double-click the script. Now, one thing though, before you double-click the script, you probably should save your document, and I'm going to do that right now. Because it does, like, thousands of changes, it's actually changing individual characters to other characters randomly, and it's impossible to undo.

It will take you like three days to undo all the steps that it did, so save your document. That way, if it messes something up, or you accidentally LoremIpsum-ize the wrong thing, you can always choose revert. So save your document, and then run the script. Click inside here, double-click. You can see, it's doing lots of changes. Doesn't take too long though. Look at that (laughs). Let's zoom in. So it's the same formatting, same link, same bold text, except it's all different text. Isn't that amazing? I love that.

That's LoremIpsum-izer, and you can get it from InDesignSecrets.com.