It's meaningless, just some typographical fun. I was feeling puckish that day. Though, the fact is, there is such a thing as lorem ipsum text.
In layout, it's sometimes more important to get the idea of the 'look' of the general layout than to be worrying about the actual words that will be there. Then, we use placeholder, or FPO (for positioning only) text. Lorem Ipsum. Greeking. Here's a classic example:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.
So, you're laying out a page or coming up with concepts for, say, a webpage look. It has blocks of text. You can cut and paste various things from various documents and put it in, and that would work, but there would be enough meaning that it would still distract. Greeking is great because there is no meaning in it, allowing focus on the bare necessities of the layout, but still giving an impression of text there.
After reading that one may wonder about the history of this mystery. As usual, Pariah Burke delivers the goods. It should be a fascinating read even if you isn't a designer.
The top-dog layout programs allow you to generate such placeholder text with little effort. InDesign has a "Fill with Placeholder Text" option on the Type pulldown, and QuarkXPress has an XTension called "Jabberwocky" which is accessed through the Utilities menu as the "Jabber" command.
Both get the job done. Of the two, Quark's is more adventurous and delightful. You can Jabber eight ways: in prose or in verse, and from the English, Latin, Esperanto...and Klingon vocabularies. Not only this, but you can edit the individual dictionaries. Quite fun. Someone obviously had a good time coming up with this one.
So picture a critque with Klingon jabber. Wouldn't that leave an impression?
But, hey, it's all Greek to me anyway.
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