AG.2 International Character Set Support on the Mac

The Mac uses a non-standard encoding for the upper 128 single-byte characters. It also deviates from the ISO 2022 standard by using character codes in the range 128-159. The coding system mac-roman is used to represent this Mac encoding. It is used for editing files stored in this native encoding, and for displaying file names in Dired mode.

Any native (non-symbol) Mac font can be used to correctly display characters in the mac-roman coding system.

The fontset fontset-mac is created automatically when Emacs is run on the Mac. It displays characters in the mac-roman coding system using 12-point Monaco.

To insert characters directly in the mac-roman coding system, type C-x RET k mac-roman RET, customize the option keyboard-coding-system, or put this in your init file:

(set-keyboard-coding-system 'mac-roman)

This is useful for editing documents in native Mac encoding.

You can use input methods provided either by LEIM (see section Q.4 Input Methods) or the Mac OS to enter international characters.

To use the former, see the International Character Set Support section of the manual (see section Q. International Character Set Support).

To use input methods provided by the Mac OS, set the keyboard coding system accordingly using the C-x RET k command (set-keyboard-coding-system). For example, for Traditional Chinese, use `chinese-big5' as keyboard coding system; for Japanese, use `sjis', etc. Then select the desired input method in the keyboard layout pull-down menu.

The Mac clipboard and the Emacs kill ring (see section H.7 Deletion and Killing) are connected as follows: the most recent kill is copied to the clipboard when Emacs is suspended and the contents of the clipboard is inserted into the kill ring when Emacs resumes. The result is that you can yank a piece of text and paste it into another Mac application, or cut or copy one in another Mac application and yank it into a Emacs buffer.

The encoding of text selections must be specified using the commands C-x RET x (set-selection-coding-system) or C-x RET X (set-next-selection-coding-system) (e.g., for Traditional Chinese, use `chinese-big5-mac' and for Japanese, `sjis-mac'). See section Q.9 Specifying a Coding System, for more details.