Legacy Document

Inside Macintosh: Text /

Chapter 1 - Introduction to Text on the Macintosh / Macintosh Text Overview

Macintosh Text Utilities

The Text Utilities are a broad collection of text-manipulation routines provided by Macintosh system software. With Text Utilities calls, you can

• specify strings for various purposes
• sort strings, including strings in any writing system and combinations of strings in different writing systems
• convert case or strip diacritical marks from text for sorting purposes
• format numbers and currency
• format dates and times
• search and replace text
• find word boundaries and line breaks when laying out lines of text

Some Text Utilities routines function with the Roman script system only, but many are script-aware and work properly with all script systems. Script-aware Text Utilities routines rely on a script system's international resources to define the specific behavior in that script system.

The Text Utilities are described in the chapter "Text Utilities" in this book.