Mac OS Roman is a

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

created by Apple Computer, Inc. for use by

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

computers. It is suitable for representing text in English and several other languages that use the Latin script. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical to

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

, 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 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, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, though the standard character encoding is now

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

. Apple modified Mac OS Roman in 1998 with the release of Mac OS 8.5 by replacing the

currency sign A currency symbol or currency sign is a graphic symbol used to denote a currency unit. Usually it is defined by a monetary authority, such as the national central bank for the currency concerned. A symbol may be positioned in various ways, acc ...

with the

euro sign The euro sign () is the currency sign used for the euro, the official currency of the eurozone. The design was presented to the public by the European Commission on 12 December 1996. It consists of a stylized letter E (or epsilon), crossed by ...

, 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 Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a Numeral system#Positional systems in detail, positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbo ...

code for each character in the table.

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 Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

Articles with unsupported Private Use Area characters Computer-related introductions in 1989

Character set

See also

Notes