What does 'lorem ipsum dolor' mean?

'Lorem ipsum dolor' is the first part of a nonsense paragraph sometimes used to demonstrate a font. It has been well established that if you write anything as a sample, people will spend more time reading the copy than looking at the font. The "gibberish" below is sufficiently like ordinary text to demonstrate a font but doesn't distract the reader. Hopefully....

Rick Pali submits the following from Before and After Magazine (Vol.4 Nr.2):

"After telling everyone that Lorem ipsum, the nonsensical text that comes with PageMaker, only looks like Latin but actually says nothing, I heard from Richard McClintock, publication director at the Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, who had enlightening news:

"Lorem ipsum is latin, slightly jumbled, the remnants of a passage from Cicero's _de Finibus_ 1.10.32, which begins 'Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit...' [There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain.]. [de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, written in 45 BC, is a treatise on the theory of ethics very popular in the Renaisance.]

"What I find remarkable is that this text has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since some printer in the 1500s took a galley of type and scambled it to make a type specimen book; it has survived not only four centuries of letter-by-letter resetting but even the leap into electronic typesetting, essentially unchanged except for an occational 'ing' or 'y' thrown in. It's ironic that when the then-understood Latin was scrambled, it became as incomprehensible as Greek; the phrase 'it's Greek to me' and 'greeking' have common semantic roots!"