Is there something like a lorem ipsum generator?

Question

Is there something like a 'lorem ipsum generator'? I know it exists in Latex, and even in LibreOffice, but I'm looking for a terminal command. I would like to type something like loremipsum 10 >> file1.txt that would give me the first 10 paragraphs of lorem ipsum, each paragraph ended with one LF-character and 1 empty white line between each paragaph. And the output would be redirected to a file called file1.txt in the current directory.

Answer 1

You can use the perl library libtext-lorem-perl. Here a short example, feel free to expand it to parse command line arguments, etc.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use Text::Lorem;

my $text = Text::Lorem->new();
$paragraphs = $text->paragraphs(10);

print $paragraphs;

Answer 2

found this at Bash One-Liners

 tr -dc a-z1-4 </dev/urandom | tr 1-2 ' \n' | awk 'length==0 || length>50' | tr 3-4 ' ' | sed 's/^ *//' | cat -s | sed 's/ / /g' |fmt

must be limited by another command or generates text infintely

Answer 3

Fedora and Arch Linux's AUR have a lorem-ipsum-generator package:

lorem-ipsum-generator -p 10 -l

will do exactly what you are asking for.

Another DIY alternative :

info bash -o -|shuf -n50|sed 's/  */ /g;s/^ //'|fmt -w 90

This outputs bash documentation into stdout, pipes it to shuf which randomly selects 50 lines, then sed removes multiple and leading spaces, and finally fmt formats it to lines approximately 90 characters long.

Of course this is just a starting point and you might need to refine the output, for which sed, tr and other string manipulators will help.

shuf, fmt and tr are parts of coreutils (which has a great chance of being already installed on your GNU/Linux distribution).

Answer 4

While not technically Lorem Ipsum or a local binary, there is an API on Metaphorpsum which can output similar text but in English. I call it with curl like so:

• curl http://metaphorpsum.com/sentences/3
• curl http://metaphorpsum.com/paragraphs/20

Better still, you can define the API call as a function in your bash profile or scripts like this:

loremipsum () {
if [ "${1}" = "" ] || [ "${2}" = "" ]; then
echo "Usage: loremipsum [paragraphs, sentences] [integer]"
else
curl -s http://metaphorpsum.com/"${1}"/"${2}" && printf "\n"
fi
}

You can then use it in a very similar way to your example:
loremipsum paragraphs 10 >> file1.txt

Answer 5

Generate random lorem ipsum text using Metaphorpsum API

Default to 3 sentences

lorem() { 
  curl -s http://metaphorpsum.com/sentences/${1-3} | pbcopy
  pbpaste | grep .
}

BOUNS: avoids curl progress, removes % from output, and adds to your clipboard for ease of pasting, while still displaying to stdout

Example usage #1:

lorem

It's an undeniable fact, really; the starter is an outrigger. One cannot separate professors from moody gases. Few can name an unpraised oil that isn't a leery relative.

Example usage #2:

lorem 1

The shrinelike swedish comes from a foremost syrup.

Answer 6

The following command has been useful for me in many situations:

base64 /dev/urandom | awk '{print(0==NR%10)?"":$1}' | sed 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g' | head -50

This gives 50 lines where non-alphabetical characters obtained randomly from base64 /dev/urandom have been replaced by blank spaces: sed 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g'. Each line whose index is a multiple of 10 is replaced by the empty string (in order to simulate separation of paragraphs): awk '{print(0==NR%10)?"":$1}'.

You can add | awk '{ print NR,$0 }' at the end to get numbered lines (or any other that meets your needs). An executable bash-script lipsum that accepts the number of lines as argument could be useful.

#!/usr/bin/bash
base64 /dev/urandom | awk '{print(0==NR%10)?"":$1}' | sed 's/[^[:alpha:]]/ /g' | head -$1 | awk '{ print NR,$0 }'

lipsum 100 > output_file

Answer 7

Found two other python libs to be used

• https://github.com/camelware/camel-ipsum-python
• https://github.com/per9000/lorem

Answer 8

I made a simple offline solution by means of one of the many lorem ipsum generators on the web. Store a moderate amount of text -- say 20 paragraphs -- in a file, and make the following script executable:

#!/bin/bash
file=$HOME/lib/text/lorem_ipsum && cat $file

Answer 9

Lorem Ipsum Generator Web site : - http://lorem-ipsum.perbang.dk/ (you can select nb of paragraph, etc)