lipsum – Easy Methods for Obtaining Lorem Ipsum Text in LaTeX

lipsum

Many questions use lorem ipsum filler text from package lipsum. I am testing a regex script on text files nested within different folders. For this and to improve LaTeX understanding better I would like to output lipsum text into a plain text file.

A manual way is to run a LaTeX engine (say pdflatex), open the pdf and copy and paste into a plain text document. The \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} line have added to aid copying, but am unsure if this makes a difference to the lorem ipsum text.

Here are two ideas, but I do not know if these are feasible methods nor how to implement them if they are.

Use pdflatex (or other command) flags.
Use TeX command line tools to identify the file location within the lipsum package where the lorem ipsum text is located.

From these the lorum ipsum text could be obtained and redirected to a text file.

The functionality to vary the amount of lorum ipsum text may also be helpful, for example if output to three files they could each have a different amount of filler text. This would rule out 2. above.

The accepted answer here Is it possible to generate a set amount of words using lipsum? says “the output of \lipsum is protected, so the only way get the text is to copy it from a previous PDF”. An explanation of this is also welcome.

Best Answer

You can use \unpacklipsum:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\newwrite\lipsum
\immediate\openout\lipsum=\jobname.txt

\unpacklipsum[1]
\immediate\write\lipsum{\lipsumexp}

\stop

The generated file will be

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. Donec vehicula augue eu neque. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Mauris ut leo. Cras viverra metus rhoncus sem. Nulla et lectus vestibulum urna fringilla ultrices. Phasellus eu tellus sit amet tortor gravida placerat. Integer sapien est, iaculis in, pretium quis, viverra ac, nunc. Praesent eget sem vel leo ultrices bibendum. Aenean faucibus. Morbi dolor nulla, malesuada eu, pulvinar at, mollis ac, nulla. Curabitur auctor semper nulla. Donec varius orci eget risus. Duis nibh mi, congue eu, accumsan eleifend, sagittis quis, diam. Duis eget orci sit amet orci dignissim rutrum.

Related Solutions

Blindtext – Alternatives to ‘Lorem Ipsum’

One of the problems I had found with lipsum was that \lipsum provides formatting for its paragraphs (\pars, etc.). For a number of applications where you want to test a macro that manipulates plain text, it would be nice to be able to get lipsum text without the formatting.

So I contacted the author, and he was gracious enough to provide me with the following code (\singlelipsum{}), which provides just the text of a single lipsum paragraph, without any paragraph formatting.

\usepackage{lipsum}
\makeatletter
\newcommand\singlelipsum[1]{%
  \begingroup\let\lips@par\relax\csname lipsum@\@roman{#1}\endcsname
\endgroup }
\makeatother

Perhaps this would satisy your particular need, which was unstated in your question.

As noted in the comments to this answer, there is a \lipsum* macro (or alternately a [nopar] package option) which will suppress the terminating \par on lipsum paragraph outputs. HOWEVER, \lipsum* and \singlelipsum are not identical. Here is an MWE which shows it:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{censor}
\makeatletter
\long\def\blackout#1{%
  \def~{-}%
  \protected@edef\save@arg{#1}%
  \expandafter\censor@Block\save@arg\stringend\let~\sv@tilde}
\newcommand\singlelipsum[1]{%
  \begingroup\let\lips@par\relax\csname lipsum@\@roman{#1}\endcsname
\endgroup }
\makeatother
\begin{document}
\blackout{\singlelipsum{4}}
%\blackout{\lipsum*[4]}
\end{document}

As it is given, it compiles. But if you uncomment the second to last line, which is nominally similar to the third to last line, it breaks the code.

[Tex/LaTex] text in latex latin

This is often-used "dummy text" suggesting that there is a placeholder in the template for which you did not overwrite the text with your own. It's used to show "bla bla bla here is some text and this is what it will look like" but trying to look more interesting. It is scrambled Latin that has been in use since the 1500's, although the original text is over 2000 years old. See http://www.lipsum.com

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Blindtext – Alternatives to ‘Lorem Ipsum’

[Tex/LaTex] text in latex latin

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