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For testing fonts, producing Lorem Ipsum text is a common practice. There are other attempts to creating such sample texts too. E.g., the "quick brown fox" line. I am aware that the primary motivation of the sample text is to display all the characters available in the script, so that the font undergoes a stress test. But, e.g., Google fonts uses some text from Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I guess, it makes sense because they have to produce sample text for so many scripts and UDHR is so far the most translated secular prose document. So for getting comparable results cross-linguistically, it provides a common data source. But keeping this factor aside, is it a typographically wise decision to use it as sample text? I am willing to create a(nother) LaTeX package to produce sample text for showcasing how a document is created in LaTeX and I want to keep it multilingual. In that case, I am attracted to trying it out with UDHR, but I am worried if it will be a good sample. For your reference, I am attaching a quick animated view of the document that I have managed to produce:

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Will something like this be good for testing the document layout and the fonts?

For reasons not known to me the gif wasn't directly visible in the post. Now it seems to be visible, but its resolution is bad. Here is a link to the PDF.

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This question is a bit opinion based, so what follows is just my opinion.

I think the declaration of human rights would be OK for testing out a few lines of text for font samples. I don't think you need every single glyph or letter in such a sample. You are not limited to this however. If you don't just want to copy google's approach, there are other samples of text you could use. Maybe the works of Shakespeare, or maybe even other quotes from famous writers, etc.

However, I'd personally rather use Lorem Ipsum for layout purposes, like for generating whole paragraphs/pages of text. These use cases aren't really the same. They perform different functions.

What's good about Lorem Ipsum is that it can be used to make blocks of text. It's genericness is useful. It's just text. It has no specific meaning. There's no formatting. There are no numbers or weird glyphs. It looks like normal paragraphs of text, like you'd find in a book, or magazine.

I wouldn't use the declaration of human rights for layout, or quotes from real books/authors. The problem is that these already have a layout, specific paragraphs, and formatting, maybe even numbers, or lists. This kind of text is just too specific, and not generic enough. So, it won't work well for blocks or paragraphs or full pages of generic text for layout purposes when all you really need is unformatted filler text that is devoid of any actual meaning.

Also worth pointing out that most people already know that Lorem Ipsum is filler text. If you use actual text with meaning, you might have to explain that the text is only being used as a filler or place-holder. Also, the content itself could be distracting.

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  • The problem is that I want to keep it multilingual as I mentioned and UDHR is translated already in many languages. That's why I find it attractive. Maybe I should go the Google way and pick some paragraphs that are bigger. That way I can create a lipsum-like block text that flows across pages and fits in multiple layouts and I can have a sample "document" which may not fit custom layouts, but it will be a good sample for seeing how a more realistic document may look. Commented yesterday
  • @niru Surely the samples don't need to mean the same thing in different languages. The whole point of samples is that they are somewhat generic anyway. The meaning is irrelevant. I think you may be overthinking this a bit. Commented yesterday
  • Hmm, I agree :-) I will just pick up random paragraphs then. That's an easier approach. Commented yesterday
  • @niru, also found this useful site: globalipsum.com/free-placeholder-text-generator/… - it generates placeholder/filler text for different languages. Might be useful. Commented 23 hours ago
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    Great! Thanks for sharing. Commented 23 hours ago
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Like you said, the point of a typographic sample (or specimen) is to showcase the spectrum of glyphs that a typeface provides.

The problem with UDHR is that it lacks a lot of glyphs that aren't letters, punctuation, and the occasional number (which is why the lorem ipsum is also not an effective place holder text for specimens).

My recommendation: check out this website https://www.blindtextgenerator.de and select the option "a-z A-Z 123 öüä" to get a pretty good list of everything that the UDHR doesn't already cover. I think a solid middle ground is to use UDHR to showcase the typeface in active text and also adding an excerpt from that website I linked to show the other glyphs.

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Ramin S. is a new contributor to this site. Take care in asking for clarification, commenting, and answering. Check out our Code of Conduct.
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  • Thanks for the link. I like the middle ground suggested by you, but the website seems to produce only Latin glyph shapes and nothing else. It is a good idea nevertheless, but I will have to maintain a check for each language if it has a comprehensive glyph show-case. Commented yesterday

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