Mac OS Roman

Mac OS Roman is a character encoding primarily used by Mac OS to represent text. It encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical to ASCII, with the remaining characters including mathematical symbols, diacritics, and additional punctuation marks. It is suitable for use to represent English and several other Western languages. Mac OS Roman is a superset of the original Macintosh character set, used in System 1.

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority identifies this encoding using the string "macintosh". The MIME Content-Type for this encoding is therefore "text/plain; charset=macintosh". Mac OS Roman is also referred to as MacRoman or the Apple Standard Roman character set.

With the release of Mac OS X, Mac OS Roman and all other "scripts" (as the Mac OS called them) were replaced by UTF-8 as the standard character encoding for the Macintosh operating system. However, default character encoding in Java for Mac OS X is still MacRoman (see Mac Dev Center), and the keyboard layout with its combination of control, option, and dead keys still map to the original characters in MacRoman.

Codepage layout

The following table shows how characters are encoded in Macintosh Roman. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent right below and its decimal code at the bottom.

• ^⌘ The (usually nonprintable) character 0x11 mapped to the Command key glyph (⌘) in many fonts, particularly those intended for use as system fonts. It is mappable to the Unicode character U+2318 "Place of Interest Sign" (⌘). The codes 0x12, 0x13, and 0x14 were also used for icons to indicate the shift, option, and control keys in menu items.
• ^* The codes 0xA2, 0xA3, 0xA9, 0xB1, and 0xB5 coincidentally have the same character assignment as ISO-8859-1 (and thus Unicode).
• ^¤ Before Mac OS 8.5, the character 0xDB mapped to currency sign (¤), Unicode character U+00A4.
• ^a The character 0xF0 is a solid Apple logo. The Unicode equivalent U+F8FF is in the Corporate Private Use Area, but it is probably not supported on non-Apple platforms.

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

References

• Apple Computer, Inc. (1993). Inside Macintosh: Text. New York: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-63298-5.
• Apple Computer, Inc. (1985). Inside Macintosh Volume I. New York: Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-17731-5.

External links

• http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/APPLE/ROMAN.TXT
• http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/Text/Text-30.html#HEADING30-9 Description of Mac OS Roman