Mac OS Roman is a
character encoding created by
Apple Computer, Inc.
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...
for use by
Macintosh computers.
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,
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 ''diacriti ...
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, though the standard character encodings are now
UTF-8 or
UTF-16. 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, hexa ...
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 identifies this encoding using the string "macintosh". The
MIME Content-Type for this encoding is therefore "text/plain; charset=macintosh". The Microsoft Windows code page number is
10000
10,000 (ten thousand) is the natural number following 9,999 and preceding 10,001.
Name
Many languages have a specific word for this number: in Ancient G