A typographical weight reduction program

Keystroke for keystroke, traditional Greek text is fatter (wider) than average English. A line of 25 Lorem Ipsum characters is very likely to take up more space in a layout than the 25 English characters that will eventually replace it. This may not mean much in an ad headline, but imagine the impact in a lengthy book, magazine article or catalog! Compensating for the difference often means extra layout work for the project's designer.

What makes mommy fat

The reason can be traced to a technology called microspace justification. Centuries ago, when Lorem Ipsum Greek came into common use, most typeset letters were roughly the same width. The word "mommy" (with three "M"s, among the widest letters in the alphabet) took up roughly the same space as the word "lilly".  There was no harm in using a placeholder phrase like Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, which is positively plump with "m" characters.

The computer ate my type

Microspace justification came along with phototypesetting, which used a  computer to print type on a piece of photographic paper. Thanks to the computer, letters could seek their own width and the spaces between them could be adjusted with microscopic fineness. Voila...microspace justification!  

The Divine Miss M

Now that M and W are taking up more space than T and I, traditional Lorem Ipsum begins to break down. The 446 characters in the classic block of Lorem Ipsum contains the letter M seventeen times. By contrast, the average English copy block of 446 characters uses M only six times. That's a lot of extra space, especially if you use the first sentence of Lorem Ipsum over and over again, as many designers do.

Enter Perfect Greek

The solution: create a block of dummy text that is as vaguely linguistic yet unreadable as Lorem Ipsum, while matching the letter frequency of real English. That's Perfect Greek in a nutshell. In 100 characters of English, the letter A appears eight times. So also in Perfect Greek. The same goes for E, P, Q, B, M and all the other letters in the alphabet. The number of words per paragraph also closely matches the English average, so the space between words won't throw you off.

Share it? Perfect!

We encourage you to use, recommend and share Perfect Greek with our compliments. If you'd like to share it with others on your web site, we'd appreciate a link and credit for our creation. Click here to contact the site creator for full particulars.