Apple’s Pages application provides a number of high-quality easy to use templates to create documents quickly that look very professional. One of the things I often get a question about when people begin to use these templates is why Apple creates them in some foreign language. Here’s the question I usually see:

Q:  Hey George, one thing I don’t understand is why all the text is in a foreign language when I use a template in Pages. Why doesn’t Apple just use English?

A:  Pages templates contain placeholder text, entered to show what a block of text will look like on the page without the distraction of holding any specific meaning.  This text is called lorem ipsum.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it.

“In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content that could be distracting with placeholder text may allow viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed such that it is nonsensical, improper Latin.”

The language of that text (Latin) is immaterial, as it is intended to be replaced with whatever words you want to put on the page.

To change this text, you simply click on a block of text in the templets.and start typing.

Alternatively, you can click on the text, go Edit > Paste and Match Style to replace it with text you have copied from elsewhere.