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.
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.
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 right below and its decimal code at the bottom.
^ abcdThese (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.
^ abcdeThe codes 0xA2, 0xA3, 0xA9, 0xB1, and 0xB5 coincidentally have the same character assignment as ISO 8859-1 (and thus Unicode).
^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,[1] 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"
