An unreadable font says what?

November 10, 2005 2:01 PM

Help me find a font.

I saw a font recently (here? on Lifehacker?) that gives the effect of text, but isn't actually readable, so you can use it in presentations where you just want to give the idea of text, but don't want people to be distracted by actual words. I could have sworn that I bookmarked this, but I can't find it in my del.icio.us bookmarks or my Bloglines clips. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Googling for various things like "unreadable font" or "blurry font" or "fake font" doesn't seem to do it.

(Note: I'm not talking about the "lorem ipsum" sort of fake text. This is an actual font.)

posted by MsMolly to computers & internet (7 comments total)

I don't know of a font as such, but searching for the term "greeking" or "greeked" might help. That's what it's called when, for instance, PageMaker makes text unreadable below a certain size?
posted by AmbroseChapel at 2:16 PM on November 10, 2005

This might be what you're thinking of...
posted by hototogisu at 2:28 PM on November 10, 2005

Ah ha! That's it! I wonder why that didn't come up when I looked at the AskMeFi questions tagged with "font"? Thank you!
posted by MsMolly at 2:31 PM on November 10, 2005

For what it's worth, I just searched for "unreadable". Also, AmbroseChapel, I thought "greeking" was no more than another word for "lorem ipsum"...?
posted by hototogisu at 2:31 PM on November 10, 2005

Yeah--I didn't find it through the font tag either...hmmmm...conspiracy!
posted by hototogisu at 2:32 PM on November 10, 2005

Greeking isn't really the same as lorem ipsum. When you opt to greek text below a certain size, it kind of looks like gray boxes or Xs. I believe the purpose is to save your program from trying to render tiny tiny text on the screen that you won't be trying to read that small anyway.
posted by clh at 6:06 PM on November 10, 2005

Ahhhh...cool...
posted by hototogisu at 7:09 PM on November 10, 2005