Blogs everywhere on the left side of the aisle seem to have their knickers in a twist over the White House website "Iraq News Archive". Why? Go peek. Go on. You want to, you know you want to. Then come back here.

Welcome back. Enjoy the site?

Confused? Wondering why there's Latin nonsense as fill-in text on the webpage? Dollars to dimes someone thought it would be a great idea, back in 2002, to make a website to handle all that wonderful positive news from "Renewal in Iraq" (per their banner headline) ... but it didn't exactly start streaming in, and the site wasn't dismantled.* Unluckily, it was also Googled & someone ran across it and, they're off! bloggers were on it like hounds on a rabbit.

Still confused? Then you're not a typesetter or work in publishing as, say, an editor. That's okay, it's not your fault if so. (Hey, you didn't join the ranks of one of the lowest-paying white-collar professions in the U.S.? It isn't too late!) Compositors have, since round about the sixteenth century, been using flubbed-up Cicero text** (in Latin, 'natch) for mocking up typeset pages when the text isn't yet ready to flow in. It's called greeking (which is not what you learned greeking was back at the frat house, so get your mind out of the gutter).

If you didn't already know about it, there's a half-decent lorem ipsum website which I recommend above all others; not only does it give a decent (and reasonably accurate) history of greeking & its Latin text, but the variants of lorem ipsum (and modern bastard variants, if such can be said of a bit of text that's already munged, including some that are quite rude if you know Latin), and a lovely lorem ipsum generator (which I've used on many an occasion).

That's one thing I liked about Pagemaker as a typesetting program. For all its faults, it had a lorem ipsum generator built into it, for greeking up a page. Someone needs to build one for InDesign.

Update: See the first comment below for a correction (thank you!) -- InDesign does have a "Fill With Placeholder Text" function under the Type menu, though it's far from the real Ipsum Lorem text. I'd love to know where it came from! The nonsense seems to be from any number of languages, or mock languages. (I'm on deadline, and if I Google this today, I'll blow the deadline.)

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* It's obvious this is FPO (For Positioning Only) text from the contents, but also from the webpage source. Take a peek and scroll almost all the way to the bottom of the unwieldy CSS embedded in the code. See where the "style" tag ends for the CSS code? (Or just look for the "lorem ipsum" text to begin and scroll up a few lines. There's a string of code for the table in which the greeking text appears. That code has a tag -- SUMMARY="Layout Table for Display Purpose Only". Voila! FPO.

** Actually, it's from "De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum" (The Extremes of Good and Evil).

Yes, the Cicero links are to the Latin. Deal.