From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 2

Using placeholder text to mock up pages - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Typography Part 2

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Using placeholder text to mock up pages

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- [Voiceover] It's a very common approach to use placeholder, or dummy text, until such time as the real text is written. In the case of this poster, I'll press W to turn on my guides, here's a frame to accommodate the text, I'll press T to switch to my type tool, click inside that frame to convert it to a text frame, come to my Type menu, and choose Fill with Placeholder Text. I can then manipulate that text in any way that I need to. Placeholder text is often referred to as Lorem Ipsum, Lorem Ipsum being the old standby text file that's used for this purpose. InDesign's placeholder text is actually not Lorem Ipsum and if want Lorem Ipsum you can come to this website where you can generate a specified number of words, or paragraphs, of Lorem Ipsum and then you can copy and paste this into InDesign. A related approach is to create a wire frame of your document, and in this case I have color coded these frames according to the layers that they're on. I know at a glance that the red frames are my picture placeholders and the blue frames are my text placeholders. Once again I can come to the text frame, click in it with my type tool, and then I can establish the text flow or text threads even before I actually have any text content. And I can do that by coming and clicking on the out port and then clicking in the next frame. Then with either of these frames selected, I can come to the Type menu and choose Fill with Placeholder Text. This time though I'm gonna hold down the command key when I choose that because you can also use non-Roman alphabets. The final point I want to make about placeholder text is that it's a very frequently used option, it doesn't have a keyboard shortcut, so you might consider making one. Come to Edit, Keyboard shortcuts, create yourself a new shortcut set if you don't have one already, and then from the product area choose Type Menu, scroll down until you see the menu item Fill with Placeholder Text, find a shortcut that's not already taken. I will use Control + P, assign that, click Ok, and we see that that keyboard shortcut can now be used any time I need to fill a frame with placeholder text.

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