This presentation provides an overview of the Unicode support available to end users and developers on Apple's system software products: Mac OS X, Mac OS 9, and CarbonLib.

Summary

As one of the founding members of the Unicode consortium, Apple has always had a keen interest in supporting the Unicode standard. In recent versions of Mac OS, that interest is now reaching fruition.

Apple's support for Unicode started with character set conversion, and has grown to include rendering, input, editing, and text services such as collation and text breaking. Apple's latest operating system, Mac OS X, reaches a new level in support for Unicode.

Application developers have a choice of development paths on Mac OS. Up until now, applications have been based on the classic Mac OS APIs, which are still supported on Mac OS 8 and 9. As part of Mac OS X we introduced the Carbon APIs, an evolution of the original classic APIs. These APIs are available on Mac OS X, but also available via CarbonLib on Mac OS 8 and 9. Finally, we have our object-oriented API set, Cocoa, which takes full advantage of the capabilities of Mac OS X and is consequently only available on that platform. We will discuss the support for Unicode in all three of these API sets, and also discuss considerations for application developers in deciding which API set to use.

We will also discuss support for Unicode at the end-user level on Mac OS X and Mac OS 9, and survey the user applications which this support enables. Such support includes Unicode file names in the Finder, and bundled applications which support the entire Unicode repertoire.