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.

The following table shows how characters are encoded in Mac OS Roman. Each character is assigned a number from 0-255. The table shows the number in hexadecimal with the least-significant digit providing the column headings and the most-significant digit providing the row headings.

1. Before Mac OS 8.5, the character 0xDB mapped to currency sign (¤), but this was changed to euro currency (€).

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

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

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.

Character sets | Mac OS character encodings | Mac OS

Macintosh Roman | MacRoman | MacRoman