Mac OS Roman

Mac OS Roman is a character encoding primarily used by the classic 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 English and several other Western languages. Mac OS Roman is a superset of the original Macintosh character set, used in System 1.

Not to be confused with HP Roman or Macintosh Latin encoding.

Mac OS Roman

MIME / IANA	macintosh
Alias(es)	mac, MacRoman, x-mac-roman
Language(s)	English, various others
Classification	Extended ASCII, Mac OS script
Extends	ASCII

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 Microsoft Windows code page number is 10000. IBM uses code page/CCSID 1275.[1][2][3][4]

Characters that were in ISO 8859-1 but not in Mac OS Roman were a source of trouble trying to display or edit web pages on Macintosh computers.

Codepage layout

The following table shows how characters are encoded in Macintosh Roman. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent.

Mac OS Roman[5][6]

	_0	_1	_2	_3	_4	_5	_6	_7	_8	_9	_A	_B	_C	_D	_E	_F
0_	NUL 0000	SOH 0001	STX 0002	ETX 0003	EOT 0004	ENQ 0005	ACK 0006	BEL 0007	BS 0008	HT 0009	LF 000A	VT 000B	FF 000C	CR 000D	SO 000E	SI 000F
1_	DLE 0010	⌘[lower-alpha 1] 2318	⇧[lower-alpha 1] 21E7	⌥[lower-alpha 1] 2325	⌃[lower-alpha 1] 2303	NAK 0015	SYN 0016	ETB 0017	CAN 0018	EM 0019	SUB 001A	ESC 001B	FS 001C	GS 001D	RS 001E	US 001F
2_	SP 0020	! 0021	" 0022	# 0023	$ 0024	% 0025	& 0026	' 0027	( 0028	) 0029	* 002A	+ 002B	, 002C	- 002D	. 002E	/ 002F
3_	0 0030	1 0031	2 0032	3 0033	4 0034	5 0035	6 0036	7 0037	8 0038	9 0039	: 003A	; 003B	< 003C	= 003D	> 003E	? 003F
4_	@ 0040	A 0041	B 0042	C 0043	D 0044	E 0045	F 0046	G 0047	H 0048	I 0049	J 004A	K 004B	L 004C	M 004D	N 004E	O 004F
5_	P 0050	Q 0051	R 0052	S 0053	T 0054	U 0055	V 0056	W 0057	X 0058	Y 0059	Z 005A	[ 005B	\ 005C	] 005D	^ 005E	_ 005F
6_	` 0060	a 0061	b 0062	c 0063	d 0064	e 0065	f 0066	g 0067	h 0068	i 0069	j 006A	k 006B	l 006C	m 006D	n 006E	o 006F
7_	p 0070	q 0071	r 0072	s 0073	t 0074	u 0075	v 0076	w 0077	x 0078	y 0079	z 007A	{ 007B	| 007C	} 007D	~ 007E	DEL 007F
8_	Ä 00C4	Å 00C5	Ç 00C7	É 00C9	Ñ 00D1	Ö 00D6	Ü 00DC	á 00E1	à 00E0	â 00E2	ä 00E4	ã 00E3	å 00E5	ç 00E7	é 00E9	è 00E8
9_	ê 00EA	ë 00EB	í 00ED	ì 00EC	î 00EE	ï 00EF	ñ 00F1	ó 00F3	ò 00F2	ô 00F4	ö 00F6	õ 00F5	ú 00FA	ù 00F9	û 00FB	ü 00FC
A_	† 2020	° 00B0	¢ 00A2[lower-alpha 2]	£ 00A3[lower-alpha 2]	§ 00A7	• 2022	¶ 00B6	ß 00DF	® 00AE	© 00A9[lower-alpha 2]	™ 2122	´ 00B4	¨ 00A8	≠ 2260	Æ 00C6	Ø 00D8
B_	∞ 221E	± 00B1[lower-alpha 2]	≤ 2264	≥ 2265	¥ 00A5	µ 00B5[lower-alpha 2]	∂ 2202	∑ 2211	∏ 220F	π 03C0	∫ 222B	ª 00AA	º 00BA	Ω 03A9	æ 00E6	ø 00F8
C_	¿ 00BF	¡ 00A1	¬ 00AC	√ 221A	ƒ 0192	≈ 2248	∆ 2206	« 00AB	» 00BB	… 2026	NBSP 00A0	À 00C0	à 00C3	Õ 00D5	Œ 0152	œ 0153
D_	– 2013	— 2014	“ 201C	” 201D	‘ 2018	’ 2019	÷ 00F7	◊ 25CA	ÿ 00FF	Ÿ 0178	⁄ 2044	€[lower-alpha 3] 20AC	‹ 2039	› 203A	fi FB01	fl FB02
E_	‡ 2021	· 00B7	‚ 201A	„ 201E	‰ 2030	Â 00C2	Ê 00CA	Á 00C1	Ë 00CB	È 00C8	Í 00CD	Î 00CE	Ï 00CF	Ì 00CC	Ó 00D3	Ô 00D4
F_	[lower-alpha 4] F8FF	Ò 00D2	Ú 00DA	Û 00DB	Ù 00D9	ı 0131	ˆ 02C6	˜ 02DC	¯ 00AF	˘ 02D8	˙ 02D9	˚ 02DA	¸ 00B8	˝ 02DD	˛ 02DB	ˇ 02C7

  Letter   Number   Punctuation   Symbol   Other   Undefined

1. These (usually nonprintable) characters are Command, Shift, Option, and Control key glyphs in many fonts, particularly those intended for use as system fonts, so that shortcuts in menu items could be drawn. The Command glyph is mappable to U+2318 ⌘ PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN.
2. The codes 0xA2, 0xA3, 0xA9, 0xB1, and 0xB5 coincidentally have the same character assignment as ISO 8859-1 (and thus Unicode).
3. Before Mac OS 8.5, the character 0xDB mapped to currency sign (¤), Unicode character U+00A4.
4. The character 0xF0 is a solid Apple logo. Apple uses U+F8FF in the Corporate Private Use Area for this logo, but it is usually not supported on non-Apple platforms.

Application notes

With the release of Mac OS X, Mac OS Roman and all other "scripts" (as classic Mac OS called them) were replaced by UTF-8 as the standard character encoding for the Macintosh operating system. However, the default character encoding in Java for Mac OS X remained MacRoman,[7] and the keyboard layout with its combination of control, 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 .bashrc:

export set JAVA_OPTS="$JAVA_OPTS -Dfile.encoding=UTF8"

See also

• Western Latin character sets (computing)

References

1. "Code page 1275 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-17.
2. "CCSID 1275 information document". Archived from the original on 2016-03-27.
3. Code Page CPGID 01275 (pdf) (PDF), IBM
4. Code Page CPGID 01275 (txt), IBM
5. Apple Computer, Inc. (2005) [1995-04-15]. "ROMAN.TXT: Map (external version) from Mac OS Roman character set to Unicode 2.1 and later". Unicode Consortium. Retrieved 2020-04-15.
6. International Components for Unicode (ICU), macos-0_2-10.2.ucm, 2003-02-20
7. "Java Development Guide for Mac: User Interface Toolkits for Java". Archived from the original on 2012-11-19.

• 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.

External links

• "Description of Mac OS Roman". 2009. Archived from the original on 2009-05-27.
• "Apple Quickdraw Character Set". Kermit. Columbia University. Retrieved 2020-06-24.