Lorem Ipsum Text

Scrivener Wish List
1

Scrivener has so many options in it; how about an Insert button that would splash some Lorem Ipsum onto my document so I could quickly test the myriad of compiler options, fonts, formatting schemes etc. etc.

If you are familiar with the publishing software QuarkXpress it has such a button under its Tools tab.

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2

On the meantime, you may want to try this tool:

lipsum.com/

It will generate a Lorem Ipsum text by paragraphs, words and lists, by the size you want.

Hope this helps!

3

I have a couple of project templates (one for standard rich text and another for MMD) that is filled with several thousand words of “lorem ipsum” text (using a similar tool as the one r6d2 posted) that I use for just this sort of thing, as well as for testing the software in general. If you think this would be useful for you, I’d consider making such a template. I probably build out dozens of these every day, but I doubt most people really need something like that, so I’m not sure about it being a dedicated feature.

4

Thanks - that would be great !

When I make a custom template filling it with dummy text helps me remember how it will print.

5

Cupcake Ipsum generates less boring text.

I hate that I know that.

6

I have a TextExpander shortcut set up that creates a couple of pages of Loren ipsum text whenever I type “llorem”. I use it all the time. This sort of thing is easy to set up in several ways so is a bit out of scope as a specific Scrivener feature, although hopefully Ioa’s template will be useful.

7

Here are the two templates in a zip file. These should work fine for either platform, as they do not have any special compile settings or anything. They are intentionally fairly vanilla save for a little starter data. Two things to note:

  • They have been set to exclude themselves from automatic backups so you can create them and dismiss them without bloating your backup folder. Don’t use them for real work without turning that off. :slight_smile:
  • The non-MMD one on the Mac will use a project text format override, accessible from the Project/Text Settings... menu command. This means editor documents will use Adobe Garamond Pro with paragraph indent, instead of whatever you default formatting settings are.
  • There is nothing special about the MMD project. It is the same thing except the paragraphs are double-spaced and no custom font is used.
8

Insert > Lorem Ipsum Text…" menu item! Would bring up dialog box with various parameters:

  1. User supplied char, word, sentence, paragraph, page, section, chapter, or part count target?
    a. Patterned after user specified text file.
    b. random generated.

  2. Auto generated or Specified (see below)?
    a. Average chars per word.
    b. Average words per sentence.
    c. Average sentences per paragraph.
    d. Average paragraphs per section.
    e. Average sections per chapter.
    f. Average chapters per part.

  3. Auto split into scrivener manuscript binder hierarchy?

  4. Generate Front and Back Matter?

  5. Copy generated text to clipboard, insert as new text document into binder of existing project, save as new Scrivener Project?

Yes please!

9

shopify.com/partners/blog/7 … gn-mockups

10

Yes yes yes. This is a must. I am surprised not to find it in Scrivener. I have written several such generators, not really a big programming task and many free libraries exist in most programming languages to implement the generation of Lorem Ipsum strings.

11

Since many free lorem ipsum generators exist, it’s unclear what we could offer that does not already exist.

In particular, Scrivener is primarily a text generation tool, and only secondarily a layout tool. The assumption is that by the time someone needs to experiment with layout options, they will have abundant text of their own available.

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12

Since writing the above all those years ago, there is a newer feature now that makes it possible to insert boilerplate, or even junk text like lorem ipsum, into any open project:

  1. Save some lorem text somewhere into a .txt or .rtf file in a folder. I suggest making a new one just for Scrivener templates, as you might find use for this beyond lorem text.
  2. Back in Scrivener’s preferences, under General: Shared Templates, click the Choose... button and designate the aforementioned folder.
  3. Now from any project, use the Project ▸ New from Template ▸ submenu, where you will find your lorem text file listed, any other files you’ve placed into this folder.

As for the rest, starter structure and all that, project templates already work well for spitting out a project with a bunch of stock structure in place, ready to test a compile setup or whatever you need to do with it.

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13

So by the same argument, a name generator would be superfluous?

14

Different applications serving different purposes. A randomly-generated name is fine for the second bottle-washer on the left. But few publishers will accept lorem ipsum text where Chapter 7 should be.

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