Fonts & Encodings

1.8. Apple's encodings

From the beginning, the Macintosh used its own encoding, an extension of ASCII that was still incomplete on the first Macintosh (released in 1984) but was gradually fleshed out. The unusual aspect of the Macintosh encodings is that they, like the MS-DOS code pages, include mathematical symbols. Since most fonts do not contain these symbols, MacOS had a special substitution procedure. Whichever font one used, the mathematical symbols almost always came from the same system fonts. Other special features of the Macintosh encodings: they include the 'fi' and 'fl' ligatures as well as the famous bitten apple that Apple uses as its logo.

Here is the encoding used on the Macintoshes sold in the US and in Western Europe, which is called Standard Roman [53] (a rather poorly chosen name, since the term "roman" refers to a font style rather than to a writing system):

A few details: we have already seen the German quotation marks ',' and '' in the 1252 Windows Latin 1 encoding. The character 0xDA '/' is a fraction bar. Do not mistake the characters '' and '' for the Greek ...