m5@lynx.UUCP (Mike McNally) (07/23/88)
I'm not sure this is the correct forum for this, but since I thought about the problem while looking at some desktop publisher output I decided to put the question here. Are there general rules for generating ``trash'' text for checking layouts? I know there's a word for the stuff but I can't remember; it's sometimes latin words stuck together, or just random letters. Well, it seems to me that it would be nice to generate the stuff based upon some criteria, so that (for example) if I were laying out Weekly Reader I could look at lots of small words, whilst on the other hand if I were doing some hyper-sophisticated journal like Omni or Infoworld I could look at random text with big words. I guess sentence length and punctuation frequency are important too. I guess the basic question is, how is word length distributed in typical English text? -- Mike McNally of Lynx Real-Time Systems uucp: lynx!m5 (maybe pyramid!voder!lynx!m5 if lynx is unknown)