| MIME / IANA | macintosh |
|---|---|
| Languages | English,various others |
| Created by | Apple Computer, Inc. |
| Classification | Extended ASCII, Mac OS script |
| Extends | ASCII, Macintosh character set |
Mac OS Roman is acharacter encoding created byApple Computer, Inc. for use byMacintosh computers.[1] It is suitable for representing text inEnglish and several other languages that use the Latin script. Mac OS Roman encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical toASCII, 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 217 characters.[1] Full support for Mac OS Roman first appeared inSystem 6.0.4, released in 1989,[2] and the encoding is still supported in current versions ofmacOS, though the standard character encoding is nowUTF-8. Apple modified Mac OS Roman in 1998 with the release ofMac OS 8.5 by replacing thecurrency sign with theeuro sign,[3] but otherwise the encoding has been unchanged since its release.
The following table shows how characters are encoded in Mac OS Roman. The row and column headings give the first and second digit of thehexadecimal code for each character in the table.