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.
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.
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.

Application notes

With the release of Mac OS X, Mac OS Roman and all other "scripts" 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, 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"