Mac OS Roman is a

character encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values tha ...

created by Apple Computer, Inc. for use by

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

computers. It is suitable for representing text in

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

and several other Western languages. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical to

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

, with the remaining characters including mathematical symbols,

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s, and additional punctuation marks. Mac OS Roman is an extension of the original Macintosh character set, which encoded only 217 characters. Full support for Mac OS Roman first appeared in System 6.0.4, released in 1989, and the encoding is still supported in current versions of

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and la ...

, though the standard character encodings are now

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit''. UTF-8 is capable of e ...

UTF-16 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variable-length, as cod ...

. Apple modified Mac OS Roman in 1998 with the release of Mac OS 8.5 by replacing the currency sign at position

hexadecimal In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, he ...

0xDB with the euro sign, but otherwise the encoding has been unchanged since its release.

Character set

The following table shows how characters are encoded in Mac OS Roman. The row and column headings give the first and second digit of the hexadecimal code for each character in the table.

Technical notes

The

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a standards organization that oversees global IP address allocation, autonomous system number allocation, root zone management in the Domain Name System (DNS), media types, and other Inte ...

identifies this encoding using the string "macintosh". The

MIME Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) is an Internet standard that extends the format of email messages to support text in character sets other than ASCII, as well as attachments of audio, video, images, and application programs. Message ...

Content-Type for this encoding is therefore "text/plain; charset=macintosh". The Microsoft Windows code page number is 10000. IBM uses code page/

CCSID A CCSID (coded character set identifier) is a 16-bit number that represents a particular encoding of a specific code page. For example, Unicode is a code page that has several encoding (so called "transformation") forms, like UTF-8, UTF-16 and U ...

1275. With the release of

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

, Mac OS Roman and all other "scripts" (as classic Mac OS called them) were replaced by

as the standard character encoding for the Macintosh operating system. However, the default character encoding in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

for Mac OS X remained MacRoman, and the

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. is the actua ...

with its combination of

control Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controlli ...

, option, and dead keys still map to the original characters in MacRoman. The default character encoding for Java can be changed to UTF-8 by adding the following line to

.profile 


A Unix shell is a command-line  interpreter or shell that provides a command line user interface for Unix-like operating systems.  The shell is both an interactive  command language and a scripting language, and is used by the operating system to ...

: With Java 18 and later, th
default character encoding is UTF-8
across platforms, including macOS.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mac Os Roman Character sets

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: * Rome, the capital city of Italy * Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

Articles with unsupported PUA characters Computer-related introductions in 1987

Character set

Technical notes

See also

Notes