German Placeholder Text Generator

Using it well

German Placeholder Text Generator, in practice

Compound nouns are the real test

German builds single words where English uses several — Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung is one token, not three. A long unbreakable word cannot wrap at a space, so it will push past a narrow container or force a horizontal scrollbar. Drop German into your narrowest column and see what happens; this is the single most valuable thing German placeholder text does for you.

Plan for 30% expansion

German commonly runs about a third longer than the equivalent English. A navigation label or button that fits perfectly in English is a realistic candidate for breaking in German. If the layout survives German, it will usually survive most other European languages.

Check umlauts and the ß

German uses ä, ö, ü, and ß. As with any non-ASCII character, these will expose encoding faults and fonts with incomplete glyph coverage. They also affect uppercasing — a CSS text-transform of uppercase on ß has historically produced inconsistent results across browsers, so check any component that shouts its labels.

Turn on hyphenation, then test again

The usual response to German overflow is to widen the container. The better fix is hyphenation: set hyphens: auto in CSS and give the element a lang attribute of de, because the browser cannot hyphenate correctly without knowing the language. Add overflow-wrap: break-word as a backstop for the tokens no dictionary will break. Most German layout problems disappear at that point.

Every noun is capitalised

German capitalises all nouns, not just proper ones, which visibly changes the texture of a paragraph — more vertical strokes, a busier grey value, and a different rhythm from English at the same size. It also makes all-caps styling nearly pointless for emphasis, since the text is already dense with capitals.

The sharp s has no simple uppercase

Applying text-transform: uppercase to text containing the sharp s has historically produced inconsistent results across browsers, expanding it to a double S in some and leaving it untouched in others. If any component shouts its labels, put a German string through it and look at what comes out before you rely on the transform.