Lorem ipsum

In one of the books I’m reading at the moment – Something Rotten, by Jasper Fforde – one of the characters talks in lorem ipsum, i.e. the placeholder text used by graphic designers to show what text would look like on the page. The idea is that the viewer looks at the appearance of the page, and is not distracted by the content of the text. However, I’m finding that I get distracted by the false quantities and the obviously non-Latin forms; so quite the reverse of how it’s supposed to work. One of the many side-effects of studying Latin.