The WASTE (WorldScript-Aware Styled Text Engine) is an Apple Macintosh text editing software library. The "text engine" allows Macintosh programmers to easily add advanced text display and editing features to their applications.
WASTE is a memory-based editor, which places no limit on the amount of text being edited (up to available system memory). It supports the Macintosh WorldScript system, allowing it to handle double-byte and bidirectional scripts. It included automatic support for undo operations, drag and drop editing, text justification, embedding images into text, and low-level hooks for rendering and measuring text.
Under version 2.0, WASTE gained the ability to support paragraph-level formatting, additional character styles, multiple undo/redo, unicode translation, and Mac OS X Carbon support, as well as providing new APIs for printing and string matching.
WASTE is a popular 3rd party library that has found its way into many Macintosh applications, formerly under Mac OS and now under Mac OS X, including (the Macintosh versions of) Netscape, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Entourage, Microsoft Outlook for Mac and Tex-Edit Plus.
WASTE was created by Marco Piovanelli.