Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Using Cyrillic text this way might end up running into the same problem that the creator of this font describes: designers' clients might feel that they're supposed to be able to understand it, but can't. So they might still complain that the text of their site/product/etc. has been replaced with something unintelligible, much as they seem to do now with lorem ipsum mock-ups.

The use of æ in your Cyrillic text suggests Ossetian, like in the Ossetian word дæр dær 'and'. Ossetian is the only language that uses the character æ in its Cyrillic alphabet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabets#Summary_tab...



>So they might still complain that the text of their site/product/etc. has been replaced with something unintelligible //

Perhaps the answer is to have lipsum that looks like: "Sample text, this is place-holder text. None of this is supposed to make sense. All these sentences are designed only to fill in for real text; once the real content is known it can replace this. Some other sample text is written using Lorem Ipsum - but it can be confused for a mistake. So, we use normal writing to demonstrate how content might look."

Et cetera.


I think you might have an issue with forgetting to replace text like that. It should be much easier to spot black bars / repetitive latin ('gibberish') than standard sentences.


Also, some people find text that they can understand distracting (because they're drawn to read it), which is one of the other motivations for using lorem ipsum. But apparently some people also find text that they can't understand distracting (because they're annoyed that it doesn't make sense or they don't know what it is), so it seems hard to win here!


Actually, I think it's wrong to just replace distracting text with bars, maybe there is something wrong with the text: too much, poor style etc - so leave the text where it has to be.

And for non-Latin lipsum, you can use this website: http://generator.lorem-ipsum.info/


Can't help but thinking of creating a "lorem ipsum detector" for relevant cms's.

Then if you would try to publish something that looked lorem ipsumish you'd get a warning, much the same way that you get if you try to send a mail w/o a subject field from (most?) modern mail clients.


So why won't they complain about the fonts being broken and being replaced by bars?


I used an approach to boilerplate dummy text like this. Once. It's all it took, because I immediately got a report in our issue tracker that FireFox renders the text with boxes.

Now we routinely copy/paste similar content from similar pages and use that in live mockups.


I bet they'll complain about that too!


The correct thing to do is determine how much of the complaints you get have to do with lorem ipsum, or if a little bit of additional explanation might be useful for your new/prospective clients when they see the site for the first time.

Everyone will hear complaints from their customers (I hope, or they wont have customers for very long), the question is if that is a problem that fixing will save you time or make you more money.

My read is not much of either.

If you want a fallback like this black box font for the clients who wont/cant be educated that is fine, but you might want to consider firing your client if they are causing enough exasperation that you create entirely new fonts.




Consider applying for YC's Winter 2026 batch! Applications are open till Nov 10

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: