Cicero famously orated against his political opponent Lucius Sergius Catilina. Occasionally the first Oration against Catiline is taken for type specimens: Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? (How long, O Catiline, will you abuse our patience? And for how long will that madness of yours mock us?)

In 1985 Aldus Corporation launched its first desktop publishing program Aldus PageMaker for Apple Macintosh computers, released in 1987 for PCs running Windows 1.0. Both contained the variant lorem ipsum most common today. Laura Perry, then art director with Aldus, modified prior versions of Lorem Ipsum text from typographical specimens; in the 1960s and 1970s it appeared often in lettering catalogs by Letraset. Anecdotal evidence has it that Letraset used Lorem ipsum already from 1970 onwards, eg. for grids (page layouts) for ad agencies. Many early desktop publishing programs, eg. Adobe PageMaker, used it to create templates.