Comments on: Use Your Own Placeholder Text in InDesign

By: Johannes Henseler

Johannes Henseler — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:39:12 +0000

it seems the name of the file needs to be localized: my german InDesign CS5 only accepts the german named “platzhalter.txt” file.

also, there are problems with UTF-8 encoding, it gets the german special chars wrong. I saved it with western europe (mac os roman) and it works fine.

By: VangelisB

VangelisB — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:38:49 +0000

@Jochen Uebel
@David Blatner

Hello people. Just wanted to let you know that after seeing your comment I’ve added Hebrew and a few other languages (Russian, Chinese, Japanese) to random text generator.

I’ve also added the ability to get the text in HTML with and tags. Just in case someone is already coding a web design.

Thank you in helping me make it a better tool for everyone

By: Jean-Philippe GURECKI

Jean-Philippe GURECKI — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:49:57 +0000

I’m using a French version of ID CS4 and I can’t change my placeholder text. I’ve tried Branislav Milic’s tip from his website, I’ve tried to get inspired by Alexey Kletsel’s method, but it doesn’t work at all! Could someone help me? (OK, I know, it’s not essential InDesign, but I would like to found back the klingon placeholder I used to with QXP… just for the fun! QA TLHO’ !)

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 04:13:25 +0000

@Balasubramaniam: No one knows what CS5 will have at this early date. Right now, the only good solution I know of is world tools from in-tools.com. I hope that a future version of InDesign will be fully world-aware-and-able.

By: Balasubramaniam Lakshminarayan

Balasubramaniam Lakshminarayan — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 12:57:09 +0000

I understand that Indesign CS4 has the internals for supporting Hindi in Unicode Devnagari script, but it is missing the user interfaces for this.

Some good patches and plug-in by external parties fill in this gap to some extent.

Will cs5 have the user interfaces for Hindi in Devnagari script and thus will be the first version of Indesign to fully support Hindi?

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:00:26 +0000

Thank you, Alexey, for finding this information! Very interesting. I wonder if there are other language-specific placeholder file names we should know about. Interesting…

By: Alexey Kletsel

Alexey Kletsel — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:58:43 +0000

I have found out that for Hebrew the file name should be placeholder_HB.txt and saved with encoding Hebrew (Windows). I have written about placeholder in my blog for Israelis in Hebrew. I have put a link on this post. Thank you.

By: Alexey Kletsel

Alexey Kletsel — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:21:05 +0000

Jochen, thank you very much. It actually has a Hebrew option into the “Other languages/charsets” list, just the word “Hebrew” appears in Hebrew, not in English. It is the fifth list item.

The generated text much better from the original in InDesign, but it is not working according to the way David give us.

David and Jochen, thank you again. I will send the question to Winsoft that develops the ME versions.

By: Jochen Uebel

Jochen Uebel — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:58:15 +0000

@ Alexey: Have a look here: German site English site [Editor's note: Yes, there are several other lorum ipsum random text generators on the web, including Lipsum and RandomText. But I have not seen anything that does Hebrew yet. --dblatner]

By: Alexey Kletsel

Alexey Kletsel — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:17:55 +0000

Hi David,

Thank you for the tip. I use the Middle East InDesign version. Here in Israel we have not so usable placeholder text for Hebrew. Do you know how to replace the placeholder text for non-latin languages?

Thank you in advance.