Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
Show HN: I hate online Lorem Ipsum Generator so I made my own
73 points by alanpham 773 days ago
As a designer, I use Lorem Ipsum a lot but none satisfied me. They are either too slow or too clunky.

https://loremcopy.com/

It's a weekend project so why not (•‿•)

Also, I am new here. I didn't know about Hacker News before. Glad to meet you all.

25 comments

I'm a big fan of Hipster Ipsum (https://hipsum.co).

A sample:

Pour-over leggings chicharrones same direct trade, sriracha hexagon cardigan succulents pinterest hot chicken tattooed hella. JOMO roof party disrupt taiyaki pickled ugh kickstarter ethical activated charcoal. Gastropub selvage lumbersexual, microdosing mukbang raw denim DIY edison bulb asymmetrical jawn snackwave wayfarers tofu solarpunk organic.

I like this too! Simple and minimal but there is an additional step to click "Generate"

I want to remove that step as well haha

Why does a one page static site that is a few paragraphs of text use 9.3MB of resources (4MB compressed)? Why is the tiny logo in the corner 1MB? It's absurd, especially when you say your pain point with competitors is them being slow and clunky. This could be a 5KB website with internal analytics.

It's not a great look, especially when you're plugging the design studio, collab partner, and founder for such a basic project. If it takes this much resources to make a box of text with a copy button, I would hate to see the efficiency of your larger projects.

Aside from that, congrats on making something. It's simple, looks relatively polished, and works decent. I think you could maintain the simplicity and add a few features to allow generating alternate text, and a variable number of paragraphs that can be copied at once.

Thanks for the feedback! It's true that I plugged my own studio cause I think it would not cause any harm. I just think if Shopify can plug their name on their side products like "Business Name Generator", we all can do it too.

For the "Slow" and "Clunky", I was talking more about the UX rather than the performance of such sites. The fastest way to quickly grab a "lorem ipsum".

For the 1mb logo, that's on me haha. Did it during the weekend. Thank you for letting me know.

I have no problem with anyone plugging their business. I assume the entire purpose of a small project like this one is to generate leads. I just find it disappointing that it's one of the most unnecessarily bloated websites I've seen in my life, and you plug so many people involved in the project that should know better. If you're trying to make "The fastest way to quickly grab a lorem ipsum", then you need to consider the performance and the time it takes for the site to load, not just the UX. You should be able to get this down to 100ms load times, and closer to 50ms once cached. It shouldn't be seconds.
> For the "Slow" and "Clunky", I was talking more about the UX rather than the performance of such sites.

"Clunky" I get is about UX, but "Slow"? In what way is UX of other lorem ipsum sites slow?

I typed "lorem ipsum" into a search engine and the first three results were perfectly usable. Only one of them had a "copy" button, if that's what you're after. To their benefit, they were all less than 9MB of resources.

Maybe they wanted a really High Quality logo
I'm so sorry, what's cool about the project? It's literally 10 paragraphs that you can copy. You can copy the same paragraphs into a comment here and have, presumably, very similar experience (without the megabytes of data) for a static site.

I don't mean this derogatively, I just don't understand how is this better than literally any lorem ipsum generator.

I'm getting very strong "It's not a generator, Jerry!" energy.

Glad you asked! So for reference, before I created this, I was using https://loremipsum.io/ and https://lorem2.com/. You can find more examples when you look up "Lorem Generator". They all either lack a copy button or have way too many steps to get a simple Lorem text.

For me, I just want to access a tool, do 1 step to quickly grab my Lorem and go. Hence the making of this site.

Imagine you are designing a 10-page website, you don't want to hand-select or click on "generate" and then copy every single time.

Just get in and out :D

That's the idea anyway. Thanks for your comment though, I am new here so I may not understand the culture here well.

It's just a weekend project.

Why use Lorem Ipsum, when you can just ask AI to "write 5 paragraphs about ancient Chinese pottery", on whatever topic your website/app is.
The purpose of Lorem Ipsum and similar is to provide text that looks close enough to actual content but isn't anything someone is going to get distracted by when evaluating a template. If the text is actually readable, even if entirely made up by a LLM, it doesn't work.
People get distracted by fake Latin as well. An llm can do stuff like this.

The grand entrance of the fictional house opens to a spacious living room with high ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows that offer a panoramic view of the lush garden. This text is fake. To the left, an open-plan kitchen features state-of-the-art appliances and a large island that doubles as a breakfast bar. This passage is a placeholder. Beyond the kitchen, there is a cozy dining area that can comfortably seat eight guests, surrounded by modern art pieces on the walls. Text generated by AI. Adjacent to the living room, a sliding glass door leads to a wooden deck with an outdoor fireplace, perfect for evening gatherings. This text is for illustrative purposes. Upstairs, the master bedroom boasts a private balcony overlooking the backyard, complete with a walk-in closet and a spa-like en suite bathroom. This description is not real. Finally, the basement has been transformed into a home theater with surround sound and plush seating, making it an ideal retreat for movie nights. This content is synthetic.

Client: “WTF is this?”
I think this phrase is more commonly heard the first time a client encounters lorem ipsum.
Why doesn't it work? It's closer to the real website. It works better than lorem-ipsum.
It could be mistaken for actual text that would go into the final project. Lorem-ipsum is obvious fake text. I’ve had to explain to someone what it is before, but it was obvious enough they asked instead of thinking they should review the content of the text.
Also using Lorem Ipsum makes it easy to tell at a glance whether the site/app is using real text. Using generated real text would require a bit more thought to verify that the generated text should be replaced.
Depends on the use case, I use Lorem Ipsum for text processing tests. I strongly prefer AI generated content. Not everyone uses Lorem Ipsum for UI testing/stuff.
Same as a wireframe. If you eg add colours and design elements people will focus on that.

It’s also easier to search the site for Lorem Ipsum to check you haven’t left anything. Once it’s filled with English you have a harder time finding what needs to be replaced.

I made one that does exactly that as a learning exercise. I can't post it here because it's built on a $5 VPS and free services and therefore will probably fall over if more than 3 ppl visit at the same time.

It even fetches relevant images from a stock image site (I'm not a fan of AI generated images) and handles menu and title, headings, the whole page generated from a user input prompt.

So tempted to share but 1. It's kind of trivial to set up (hint: I use Python to generate a Flask template and serve it up) and 2. Last time hn broke my VPS ;)

I guess the real challenge is to do this at scale.

Lorem Ipsum generators take a tiny fraction of the power that an AI would use. Asking an AI to do it just seems wasteful.
But of course, "If (problem) Then (problem)-solution must use AI"!

Even if it's a logical application of AI — which I don't believe it is — the author rolled up their sleeves and made a thing and probably learned a lot more than typing "hey chat-gemini-pt make me a thing".

I'd hire that guy over you any day.

Because you plan to replace the text with not garbage.
Is it a "generator" though? It seems to be static.

Well apart from Sentry, Datadog, and Loom.

> Is it a "generator" though? It seems to be static.

And the content is missing. All there is there is some placeholder text. /s

Lilipsum is good. Used to be free but I think it’s still under $5.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/littleipsum/id405772121

I would rather typing each letter our than pay $5 for a Lorem Ipsum Generator haha
I'd rather pay for things than use "free" things that aren't reliable and end up eating my time to get them working again.

Even a small fee generally is enough to keep the person who created it interested in maintaining it and improving it.

I understand the sentiment, but this is why we have the free software sustainability crisis. https://www.hendrik-erz.de/post/open-source-has-a-sustainabi... https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/sustainability/sustainability....

The time taken to type out Lorem Ipsum would be worth more than $5. I know you have other options in this case, but why would you prefer to waste your time than spend money?

Wait what? Where is the free software here?

In fact this app seems very sketchy, since its website is dead, and its description states "And it’s completely free!" while it's not.

The listing says $0.99. The description says "And it’s completely free!"
Sounds strange that someone would pay for that. But who am I to judge.
I'm one of those people. The convenience of having it readily accessible in the task bar at any point is definitely worth the $0.99 for me. Whether I'm in Figma, Sublime Text, VS Code, or Google Chrome, I can get different lengths of Lorem Ipsum in just 2 clicks with no search or loading time.
This is really cool. I wish I would have thought about this. I was recently working on a website in a different language and realized that one with multiple languages would be better.

Two suggestions for the website:

1) I opened the video and it got hidden and now I have to close the website or mute the tab.

2) >Why? Here's what Alan, our founder got what to say.

"got what to say" is wrong.

Thanks! Will fix, did it during the weekend so I myself got tunnel vision.
Google translate decided to convert the page to english. I was very pleased by the results, as they'd make fantastic names for Math Rock songs.

Till hydrogen Reserved Vulputate salad sad running. In fact, there is no advantage from the members of the pregnant, not only a lot.

I had created this many eons ago. Nothing fancy. Absolutely nothing fancy at all. Just a page from where you can copy some text. https://yash.info/lorem.htm

Yours is also cool. I like the copy buttons.

I use https://lorizzle.nl since forever ;-)

Snoop Dogg style lorem ipsum texts.

With an expired certificate?
Neat. At this point, I mostly use an LLM to generate text that looks more realistic. I find this is particularly useful with clients who aren't familiar with lorem ipsum.
Cool project, love the quick access!

It would be nice to have some multi-paragraph chunks.

It might also be nice to have a toggle to randomize the text on each copy, so subsequent copies get different words.

That's actually a good idea. It is also a pet peeve of mine so I added "variations".

Your idea is way better! Thanks

Nothing can beat Bacon Ipsum on this topic in my eyes.

https://baconipsum.com/

I don't see a generator. Am i missing something?
Doesn’t seem to generate anything. I don’t understand how other Loren ipsum sites are slow, they are literally static sites
I was thinking today that if we had to pick a latin motto, it would "lorem ipsum".
So, this is simply a static page?
If I may add suggestions, I'd love a bit of CSS for dark mode.
Dark mode everything!
my tool has lorem ipsum:

https://github.com/fosslife/devtools-x

it's offline and written in tauri+ rust

I've filed this next to the npm addOne js library
This is excellent! Very good usability solve!
could add a hotlinkable video and a picture.

maybe a different page with some inline css font-family picker with size and color.

That could work! Like a placholder video and image is various aspect ratio

Question: inline css font-family picker, is it similar to how google font works?

Doesn’t seem to generate anything
Come on people. We have generative AI now.
link is not working, it redirects me back here again