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Write esign placeholder

[Music] hi I'm Erica Gama with indesign secrets in this video I'm going to show you how to replace InDesign standard placeholder or dummy text placeholder text is just some text that we throw inside text frames so that we have something to look at when we're doing our layout if we don't have our actual copy ready to go to use InDesign standard placeholder text we simply create a text frame which I already have here on my page put our text cursor inside there and go up to the type menu and back down to the bottom fill with placeholder text now you may notice I have a keyboard shortcut set up for that I actually did a custom keyboard shortcut because I use this feature quite a bit so I'll choose fill with placeholder text and it fills the text frame with some text but as we can see it's maybe not the most helpful text now many of you may know lorem ipsum but if we look at this this isn't even the standard lorem ipsum it's just a random collection of latin words I'm not even sure they're real Latin words one of the main reasons I don't like to use this text is that if I put this in something that my client sees they're often confused why I'm using gobbledygook in the text and not text that they are going to send me or that they want to use in their document but a lot of times we don't have that copy ready yet so we have to have something to stand in place so we can start doing the layout working with styles etc another reason this isn't great is that if I select this text and go over to the character panel down to the bottom and I look and I see that the chosen language is English because that's the language I'll be using for this document and I may have even built that language into a style so it's expecting it to be in English problem is it isn't where I run into issues with that is when I do spellcheck so if I were spell checking some other texts that were in the document and I decided to run spell check it's going to find a problem with every word that's in this particular text frame because it doesn't recognize it as English so what I want to do is I want to put some text in here that either pertains to something that my client would be interested in or maybe just some random text but at least make sure that it's in English or whatever language we're laying out in so I'm gonna select all that text and delete it just so we go back to our empty text frame and now I'm going to jump out to my desktop and I look inside to the folder where InDesign sits and in this case is just in my application folder there's nothing really in there that talks about text and that's because it's sort of a secret hidden file so the next thing I need to do is create a text file in this case I just have an RTF file and I'm using the follow the House of Usher I may go ahead and grab some text that a client has but you can use whatever text you need so you can notice that this is an RTF or a rich text file I need to make sure that it is a plain text file so the first thing I need to do is select my text go up under format and choose make plain text now I'm using TextEdit on a Mac you can use any text editor that works with plain text so I'll make plain text ask me if I want to convert yes I do now I've converted it to plain text and it also changed the file format of this file so I'm going to go ahead and save that now I need to tell InDesign that this is the special placeholder text so that's pretty simple I'm going to come to this file and I'm just simply going to change the name placeholder the lowercase T X T then I'm going to take that file and just drag it into my InDesign folder okay so now I have placeholder txt I'm gonna go back to InDesign and InDesign has been running this whole time we don't have to restart it now I'm going to go up to the type menu again choose fill with placeholder text and now I have that text in there now you may want to have different files depending on the type of layout that you're doing unfortunately they all have to be called placeholder txt so you can't keep them in the same place I often have a folder full of other folders that are labeled client a client B different novels that I might be using the text of and inside each of those are the placeholder txt files at any time I can take this file and drag it out of that folder and it will just automatically revert back to the standard placeholder text that was there another option is going online and finding lorem ipsum text that you might like one of the places I like to go is called meet the ipsum com and it has just a huge list of lorem ipsum generators maybe your client is a charity and you want phrases that have to do with social good so I can click on that and in this case it says how many words or paragraphs let's say we want 150 words make it happen there's some text so we can just copy that text and put that in that placeholder txt file so that's how you swap out in designs generic placeholder text for something that makes a little more sense well I hope you found this tip helpful to thousands more in design articles and tutorials be sure to visit in design secrets calm and don't forget to sign up for our free InDesign tip of the week thanks for learning with us