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Comment by ebg13 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this misses the entire purpose of lorem ipsum. Good layout designers don't just want letters and spaces. They want letters and spaces that approximate the whitespace ratio of writing. Your version has only very long words and very short words and nothing in between. This feels like the telephone game version where all of the original intent has been lost and all that's left is a weak simulacrum in vaguely the same symbol space.

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This also misses that Lorem Ipsum is effectively gibberish for most people. It's impossible to get hung up on the content.

It is literally gibberish, for everyone.

I thought it was essentially Latin, so gibberish for most but possibly readable for those with a penchant for dead languages?

When used for typesetting the Latin was intentionally scrambled, so even someone familiar with Classic Latin should find it more gibberish than not. For instance the `lorem` itself was most likely a chopped part of a longer word (dolorem).

An interesting comparison of the "Modern" typesetter's lorem ipsum and the likely source text is in the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

I wasn't aware that Lorem Ipsum was conceived with uniform distribution of word lengths in mind. I couldn't find any information about it on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

> The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.

Could you please provide source? I am curious now.

Alternate argument is that my version represents real actual text from real books :-), but to be honest, it is a tongue-in-cheek attempt.

"The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English." via the 'Why do we use it?' section on https://www.lipsum.com/

I just posted the word length distribution graph on Github repo. In fact, contrary to the GP’s claim, Quantum Lorem Ipsum contains a larger % of shorter words than vanilla Lorem Ipsum. Also, the distribution isn’t perfectly normal. I used 16 paragraphs from both and wrote a small Julia script to analyze the word length.

I think the assertion that designers want to have a perfect normal distribution of word lengths is arguable. I’d be curious to analyze large datasets of books to see what the actual distribution of word lengths is. Heck, this may be an opportunity to actually fix vanilla Lorem Ipsum and write a script that can generate paragraphs that simulate real world distribution of word lengths! Looks like I have a project ahead of me this upcoming weekend :-).

On the flipside, maybe this version better emulates (a subset of) technical writing? So if you're tuning the design of e.g. a book or thesis, this is more representative than actual Lorem Ipsum?

I'm going to draw a hard line and say No. There is no subset of writing that produces anything that looks like this.

Not even "the set of science-based Lorem Ipsum knockoffs," huh?

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