Placeholder Text Alternatives In Adobe InDesign CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at switching out our generic Lorem Ipsum placeholder text for something a little bit more useful for other languages, like this. And some not very useful placeholder text, like this Cat Ipsum. Let's go make Cat Ipsum right now.

So, placeholder text alternatives. We're going to grab the Type tool, and draw a box on our page. I'm going to keep it 2 columns there. Zoom in a little bit. I'm going to fill it with placeholder text. Under 'Type', 'Fill with Placeholder Text'. Remember, by default, this fills it with Roman letters, it's kind of Latin, it's all mixed up, doesn't make sense, it's just good there as place holder. But let's say we're working with a client with a different language. We can-- so I've undone that, I'm going to go to 'Type', and if I hold down 'Command' key on a Mac or the 'Control' key on a PC before clicking this button here, you get this kind of little option to pick different kinds of language. It's not so much language, it's more the alphabet to be used.

So if you need to be using the Cyrillic alphabet, click 'OK'. You can see there, it's a place holder text, same sort of thing mixed up, unusable, unreadable but it's a good place holder text for that language. And you'll see there, there's Japanese, and Chinese, and Arabic. There's a bunch of different ones in there, so just hold down the 'Command' key. So that's some sort of practical use, but the next thing I'm going to show you is totally impractical. It's kind of fun, I guess, it depends.

We're going to replace our Lorem Ipsum with something else. Now in terms of Lipsum, there is lots of different options. I've jumped to Cat Ipsum but you will find Hip Hop Ipsum, Star Wars Ipsum. Whatever you want, it's going to be mixed up, just place holder text. This one here, I'm going to decide on, I just want 300 paragraphs, that sounds good. Click 'Make Muffins', it should be useful. I've got some place holder text now and it's kind of just mixed up gibberish. You can find all sorts of other alternatives. I'm going to copy it and to make this work as your default. I'm going to open up 'Text Edit' on my Mac. So Text Edit on a Mac, or Notepad on a PC. You'll have to dig through the applications folder to find them.

First thing you need to do is placing the text. Then on Notepad you just save this document as placeholder.txt On a Mac there's one more step. You need to go to 'Format', and go to 'Make Plain Text'. It's just kind of removes all the formating. Then you save it, and just make sure it's called placeholder.txt. That's the rules, and it has to be holder, not hold. So it has to be called this. Save it, and where do you save it? I'm just going to save mine to my work folder for the moment. And where does it go? This needs to go in the InDesign application folder. So on a Mac, it's pretty easy to find. If you've got it down here in your doc, you can right click it and go up to 'Options', and there's one that says Show me InDesign in a folder, please, and they'll find this out. In here it is, that's the application folder for InDesign. This is all the guts of the program.

If you just move it into there, so, placeholder text, dump it in there, and that's all you need to do. I'll leave that in your exercise files, so you don't have to make it, if you do want to have just a play with it, and see if it works. So I've put it in there, placeholder.txt, now if I go to InDesign, open it up, and if I go to 'Type', 'Fill with Placeholder Text', nothing happens. I don't have to hold anything down, you can see, I have Cat Ipsum. And that's, I know is a little ridiculous in terms of, I don't know, I like that style of stuff. So you might be working with a client that-- you might find a practical use for that, where you've got some, like placeholder text that is really useful for you and your client, and you can go off and find some stuff. As long as you call that file placeholder.txt it will just become the default for InDesign. If you want to get rid of that all you need to do is go into here, and just delete it, and InDesign will go back to the default.

Before we finish this one up I want to create a Body Copy Paragraph style. So I'm going to select all of the text. I use five clicks. So, one, two, gives you the word, one, two, three, gives you the line, one, two, three, four, gives you the paragraph. And if you do it five times, you get everything, including the overset text. I'm not sure if that's a useful shortcut, clicking five times. It's a bit of-- I use it loads, but you can just use 'Edit', 'Select All', or 'Control A' on a PC, or 'Command A' on a Mac.

With it all selected, because this is going to be an interactive document we're going to break our rules in terms of font sizes. I'm going to go up to something like 24, and under 'Paragraph' I'm going to have some space after, I'm going to have 19. Just kind of works for my interactive document that we're making. And I'm going to select it all. Five clicks and I'm going to create a Paragraph style, so under 'Window', under 'Styles', go to 'Paragraph Styles', and in here I'm going to create a new option. Double click 'Paragraph Style 1', and this one is going to be called 'MF Interactive Body Copy'. Let's click 'OK'. I'm now just going to drag this panel up, out of the way here.

Great! So that's going to be it for this video. We learned how to change the Lorem Ipsum placeholder text to a different alphabet. We also learned useless stuff on how to change it to Cat Ipsum. All right, let's get on to the next video where we do some more practical InDesign amazingness. All right, see you there.