Invisible blind text

Question

I basically want to add invisible blind text to my document. To print the rough layout and take some notes on what I want to write inside each of the missing paragraphs.

I tried:

\phantom{\blindtext}

This only reserves one (very long) line of text.

\vspace{10cm}

This does not behave like text. I could add a lot of small \vspace but maybe there is a better solution?

Answer 1

You can use a minipage or a vbox inside the \phantom-macro to get the real size.

With the blindtext inside a minipage you may get problems at pagebreaks, but a \vbox should do the work.

Check this example:

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{blindtext}
\begin{document}

%Wrong
\fbox{
\phantom{\blindtext}
}

%Problems on page breaks
\fbox{
\phantom{\begin{minipage}{\textwidth}\blindtext\end{minipage}}
}

% The solution?
\fbox{%
\phantom{\vbox{\blindtext}}%
}

\fbox{\phantom{\vbox{\blindtext}}}

\end{document}

The \fboxes are added to make the space visible. They are not part of the solution.

---

Based on the comment, I expect this is a MWE for the problem:

\documentclass[twocolumn,english]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{babel}
\usepackage{blindtext}

\begin{document}

pre1: \blindtext

pre2: \blindtext

% \phantom{\blindtext}% One long line
\phantom{\vbox{\blindtext}}%correct paragraph, but in one block.

after \blindtext

\end{document}

Maybe there is another solution, but I don't expect that it can be solved with \phantom. See also Phantom and line break

Answer 2

Setting the text color to white achieved what I was trying to do.

As leandriis wrote in a comment:

\textcolor{white}{\blindtext}