From the course: InDesign Secrets
285 Replace formatted text with lorem ipsum - InDesign Tutorial
From the course: InDesign Secrets
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.
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Contents
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229 Batch converting ID files to current version with the Book panel6m 9s
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230 Getting around InDesign limitations6m 46s
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(Locked)
231 Creating better callout lines with effects and object styles5m 47s
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232 Swapping column and row information in tables6m 9s
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(Locked)
233 Making bigger text link targets4m 52s
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161 Keeping page numbers on top of master items3m 55s
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162 Adding automatic currency symbols in a table cell or before text3m 50s
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163 Make a pop-up footnote for your ebook3m 48s
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164 Deleting tabs at the beginning of paragraphs and applying a paragraph style3m 10s
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165 Five InDesign Presentation tips6m 28s
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111 Packaging images on the pasteboard3m 32s
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112 Automatically updating figure references for books6m 9s
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113 Adding Tool Tips to your form fields in InDesign3m 21s
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114 Setting poetry, flush left, center on longest line3m 54s
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115 Use bookmarks to navigate long documents in production4m 57s
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107 Using the same keyboard shortcut for two different commands with the Context feature5m 22s
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108 Making a text highlighter3m 33s
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109 Updating an interactive PDF without losing work done in Acrobat5m 30s
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110 Adding custom text at the beginning of each line automatically4m
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089 Three great Object Styles for any designer8m 1s
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090 Choosing alpha channel image transparency2m 25s
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091 Adding and reading metadata for InDesign files3m 25s
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092 Adding ALT tags to your images6m 59s
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093 How to Place & Link a text frame's text but not its formatting7m 4s
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094 Setting the baseline position of a caption2m 39s
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051 Five things that should be in every new file5m 19s
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052 Forcing EPUB page breaks with invisible objects6m 21s
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053 Understanding component information6m 39s
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054 Creating running heads using section markers4m 16s
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055 Making a font with InDesign using the IndyFont script5m 20s
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056 Finding where that color is used7m 17s
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047 Specifying an exact amount of space between objects5m 17s
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048 Fixing last lines that are too short8m 16s
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049 Creating web graphics from your InDesign artwork7m 20s
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050 Using “No Language” to suppress unwanted hyphenation, spell-checking, and smart quotes2m 48s
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037 Updating a linked table without losing formatting5m 18s
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038 Creating electronic sticky notes4m 49s
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039 Moving master page items to the top layer for visibility2m 48s
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040 Five guide tricks that will impress your coworkers6m 18s
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041 Letting InDesign add the diacritics4m 21s
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042 Using single-cell table cells for custom paragraph formatting6m 2s
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027 Creating running heads using variables5m 1s
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028 Live Caption tips and tricks8m 3s
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029 Making professional drop caps10m 37s
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030 Making two-state buttons in interactive documents5m 5s
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031 Moving pages from one document to another3m 15s
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032 Wrapping bulleted text around a curve5m 58s
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007 Selecting through and into objects using cmd-click and Select Above/Below5m 46s
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008 Some great tips and tricks for the Swatches panel9m 40s
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009 Saving down for backward compatibility with INX and IDML5m 54s
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010 Using the INX and IDML formats to fix problems4m 46s
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