5 Dummy Text

Sometimes a problem may only occur at a certain place or after a certain point, in which case you may need to create some dummy text to pad out your example. If so, the lipsum package is a useful tool. This provides the command \lipsum which has an optional argument that specifies the paragraph or the range of paragraphs to typeset.

For example, suppose you are using the book class and you don't understand why the page number appears on the bottom of the first page of the chapter and at the top of the second page. Then you could illustrate this as follows:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage{lipsum}

\begin{document}
\chapter{Sample}

\lipsum[1-4]
\end{document}

This will produce enough text to generate two pages.

There is another dummy text package called blindtext that provides the commands \blindtext (for short blocks of text) and \Blindtext (for longer blocks of text). For example:

\documentclass{book}

\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}
\chapter{Sample}

\Blindtext
\end{document}

The blindtext package also provides other commands to provide a random document, dummy lists etc. See the blindtext documentation for further details.

There are other dummy text generators listed on CTAN Topic dummy-gen.

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