Mac OS Roman

Not to be confused with HP Roman or Macintosh Latin encoding.
Mac OS Roman
MIME / IANAmacintosh
Language(s)English, various others
Created byApple Computer, Inc.
ClassificationExtended ASCII, Mac OS script
ExtendsASCII, Macintosh character set

Mac OS Roman is a character encoding created by Apple Computer, Inc. for use by Macintosh computers.[1] It is suitable for representing text in English and several other Western languages. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical to ASCII, with the remaining characters including mathematical symbols, diacritics, and additional punctuation marks. Mac OS Roman is an extension of the original Macintosh character set, which encoded only 217 characters.[1] Full support for Mac OS Roman first appeared in System 6.0.4, released in 1989,[2] and the encoding is still supported in current versions of macOS, though the standard character encoding is now UTF-8. Apple modified Mac OS Roman in 1998 with the release of Mac OS 8.5 by replacing the currency sign with the euro sign,[3] but otherwise the encoding has been unchanged since its release.

  1. ^ a b Apple Computer, Inc. (1993). Inside Macintosh: Text (PDF). Addison Wesley Publishing Company. p. 1-53. ISBN 0-201-63298-5. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2019-12-11. Retrieved July 10, 2021.
  2. ^ Apple Computer, Inc. (1991). Inside Macintosh, Volume VI. p. 14-104. ISBN 0-201-57755-0.
  3. ^ Apple Computer, Inc. (September 14, 1998). "Technical Note TN1104: The Euro Currency Symbol". Retrieved July 10, 2021.