Great idea! Where are the verbs, though? Right now I can see from the JS source it doesn't use Markov chains [1], which could improve the result greatly. Good placeholder text in a language the user can understand (as opposed to simple Greeking [2]) is non-distracting precisely because it balances on the verge of meaning. From my experience I'd assume fake Latin and nonsense prose would both be less distracting than a soup of fascinating SF words.
Edit: Here's what a markov.js remix of William Gibson's Burning Chrome looks like:
>Los Angeles was a dream, responsive to Deke's slightest thought. For weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the Fifties. Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the museum's exhibits, a NASA Hasselblad recovered from the inside. It probably took all of Jackman's silent and vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham smiling up from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the edge of the tall drinks and paid. A big woman in green, and in- clined her head. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a way to trust in whatever context it encountered. Congratulations, I heard the woman said. That's the trouble with designer drugs; they're too clever. That stuff you're doing has some hard data, Toby; she's a hologram stuck behind my left ear, where they'd gone in to tell it to. Nobody at all. And I know you were looking for us, or for the road, admire the city walls, the high point of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were already excavating for a year later, when two leading firms had the exact change, unless he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had to jump with it, and it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the open doors and watch the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to relax.
I'm not using Markov chains, either, but my little word-babble script does fairly well when you feed it "Neuromancer":
He looked at the dance of the logics kinda bunker... It was no relationship with it... He looked like Armitage's toxin sacs. Professional pride, baby, I mean, these days? Get dressed, Case. Bus to his own laughter and smiled. Case plunged through the matrix below. He'd been slit. An AI's are still got it. Not the Baptist... Darkness there, Wintermute can. Case had the electric dance ten minutes to him... Cyberspace. A white teeth. Month later to the corridor. The phone bleated steadily. The Panther Moderns differ from the sides a burglar. He stood beside his own air in Straylight. Wintermute, Case peered at Case. You forget that made of the room. The Finn watched, then Armitage, come out. A man's voice, out of her, then. Behind the neural cutout. I think you're all together in cloud. But just above the terrorist has all of freckles.
In Gibson's world, I think the algorithm would have been obfuscated and released to the world in stages, anonymously, building up a cult following. Till one day it's revealed the algorithm has a hidden aspect which boots Wintermute.
I've run a printing press in my mis-spent youth. And repaired photo-copiers.
One technique that is often taught is to turn the page upside-down -- in order that you not be distracted by the content.
You are, at that point, and your job, is to be only interested in the copy/print quality. Registration, blur etc. Not the content. That's the editor's job. Not yours.
The same may be said in this instance for the layout. That's your focus, or should be. That's the beauty of Lorem Ipsum: most people don't know Latin. If you want a change, make it Klingon, but retain the original use. That is, to check the page. Don't make it distracting by being readable or in any way comprehensible.
From the content side, having worked for a student newspaper and having been bitten by accidentally running a bunch of pictures headlined with "Inspiring 'Red Sox Win' Photo Spread Head", something we learned was to make filler text look as obtrusive as possible, so you remember it's there and fix it before you go to press. Text with lots of "@@s" and characters with deep descenders were both helpful.
That said, I'm a big fan of The Onion's "Passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood."
> One technique that is often taught is to turn the page upside-down -- in order that you not be distracted by the content.
My reading ability is about the same either way up. A while ago we started painting instructions to "Look left" / "Look right" on UK streets according to the direction of the traffic, on the assumption that people only read the ones that appear the right way up from where they're standing. This is why I keep nearly getting run over.
There's two schools of thought. The "loren ipsum" school says you should strip out meaningful content, to focus on design. The 37 signals school says to use good defaults (instructions, example text). Either way, it shouldn't be distracting in a way which doesn't add any value.
Where are all the one, two, and three letter words? Does Gibson never use "a", "or", or "and"? More importantly, how is this an effective placeholder for English text without them? This seems all too common in these alternative ipsum generators. I guess people aren't actually supposed to use them?
Edit: Here's what a markov.js remix of William Gibson's Burning Chrome looks like:
>Los Angeles was a dream, responsive to Deke's slightest thought. For weeks he systematically visited every boozy watering hole in the Fifties. Sometimes they'd run old eroded newsreels as filler on the museum's exhibits, a NASA Hasselblad recovered from the inside. It probably took all of Jackman's silent and vast and perfectly immobile bulk wedged into a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham smiling up from the huge speakers. He sought her almost blindly on the edge of the tall drinks and paid. A big woman in green, and in- clined her head. She was everyone's giggling sister, in a way to trust in whatever context it encountered. Congratulations, I heard the woman said. That's the trouble with designer drugs; they're too clever. That stuff you're doing has some hard data, Toby; she's a hologram stuck behind my left ear, where they'd gone in to tell it to. Nobody at all. And I know you were looking for us, or for the road, admire the city walls, the high point of the hydrogen atom. Tsiolkovsky's radio telescope was tracking, relaying the signal to geosynchronous comsats that bounced it down to Plesetsk, where bulldozers were already excavating for a year later, when two leading firms had the exact change, unless he wanted and couldn't have, everything he'd had to jump with it, and it was relentlessly tacky: ephemeral stuff extruded by the open doors and watch the crowd pull me along, walking blind, willing myself to relax.
[1] For Markov chains in Javascript see, e.g., http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~cz1/prog/markov/markov.html.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greeking