GREEKING

1/26/2008

Greeking is a term used in page layout wherein the actual text is replaced by some form of arbitrary markings. This may be done because the actual text is unknown; is distracting; is irrelevant; because presentation of the actual text would be too resource intensive; or because the text is too small to read.

Where the text to be displayed is unknown or distracting, nonsense text may be used. When small size is an issue, shading or artificial characters looking somewhat text like may be used.

The term "Greeking" is thought possibly to refer to an similarity between over-shrunken/artificial characters and Greek letters. It has also been suggested that it derives form Shakespeare "It's all Greek to me."

When Greeking with readable characters or when demonstrating fonts, a nonsense pseudo-latin phrase starting with "lorem ipsum dolor ..." is often used.