Placeholder text in InDesign

Fill a frame step by step

1. Draw a text frame with the Type tool, or pick an existing one.
2. Select it with the Selection tool, or click inside it with the Type tool. You can select several frames at once.
3. Choose Type > Fill With Placeholder Text.

The text takes on the frame's paragraph style, so apply your body style first. That way the dummy text shows your real font, size and leading.

Threaded frames

If the frame is threaded to others, Adobe describes two cases:

• All frames in the thread are empty: the placeholder text starts in the first frame and runs to the end of the last one.
• Some frames already have text: the placeholder text is added after the existing text, again through to the end of the last frame.

So filling one frame of a long thread fills the whole story. That's handy for checking a multi-page layout, but it can add a lot of text.

Remove or replace it

Double-click in any frame of the thread, choose Edit > Select All, then delete the text or paste your real copy over it.

Use your own placeholder text

InDesign reads its placeholder text from a file if you give it one. Create a plain text file with the text you want, name it Placeholder.txt and save it in the InDesign application folder. Adobe documents this as the way to change the placeholder text.

This helps when your layout needs a particular kind of text, such as long German words for hyphenation, or a script other than Latin.

Paste lorem ipsum from here

If you want a set amount of text, or a list, make it below and paste it into the frame. Pasting into a frame puts the text inside that frame. If no frame is active, InDesign creates a new one.

A few tips for pasting into InDesign:

• Plain text only. Leave HTML off, or the tags will appear as text.
• Bullet lists. Pick List items, then delete the "- " from each line and apply a bulleted paragraph style instead.
• Exact length. Pick Words and type a number when a frame must hold a set number of words, for example a 250-word column.

Placeholder frames on parent pages

Adobe also uses "placeholder" for empty frames on a parent page (called a master page in older versions). You can add text frames to a parent page to act as placeholders and thread them together to set up the flow. Each document page based on that parent then has the frames ready to fill.

Before you send to print

Run Edit > Find/Change for "lorem" across the document. Placeholder text left in a caption or a pull quote is easy to miss in a long layout.