Given the Macintosh's strong roots in desktop publishing, text and fonts permeate nearly every part of the user experience in Mac OS X. You will be working with text and fonts either as an application developer using the APIs, or as a content creator making fonts that support languages and symbols within Unicode.

Text manipulation consists of creating, managing, storing, and searching for text strings. Mac OS X programming interfaces provide text manipulation capabilities that range from basic text input and display to sophisticated text encoding conversions, text-search capabilities, and document summarizations.

Creating fonts that image your text data requires knowledge of font tools, Unicode, languages and their shaping behaviors and of font formats. This information is available in the font articles.

Mac OS X offers advanced API features with a simple design that makes it easy for application developers to support an extensive range of font technologies and data formats.

You can use the Mac OS X text and font APIs to take advantage of Apple's built-in support for high-quality text rendering, resolution-independent outline fonts, and full Unicode text and layout support. These APIs help you customize text and font handling so that your application supports text editing fields; creates, copies, and compares text strings; supports text editing; and manages fonts. To control how text is laid out and rendered in the written representation of languages, these programming interfaces also enable sophisticated typography. For example, your applications can precisely position individual glyphs and lines of text, draw Unicode text at any angle of rotation, kern text, and activate and deactivate fonts.

The text system in Mac OS X is layered, with one framework interacting seamlessly with the next. For Cocoa applications, the text system is an object-oriented framework that applications can use to include powerful text editing and layout, typesetting, and Unicode font handling. For Carbon applications, the text API is the Multilingual Text Engine (MLTE), which provides editing features, and Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging (ATSUI), which provides typography and layout services.

Both of these interfaces deliver performance, scalability and consistency in handling text, as well as support Unicode. They depend on lower-level technologies that provide sophisticated font handling, glyph rendering, and typesetting, including support for non-western scripts. If your application has specialized requirements, it can use those facilities directly as well.

In addition, you can use the Apple Font Tool Suite—a set of command-line tools— to work with Apple TrueType suitcases,  dfont files and OpenType fonts to enhance their functionality and to dump their contents into XML text file formats for precise source management. There is a detailed tutorial and quick reference from which you can learn how to add powerful typographic features to your Unicode-based fonts for typographic refinement and foreign language support. With these tools, you can add automatic ligatures, alternate letterforms or support a language script like Thai, Devanagari, Burmese or Lao.

If you are ready to begin learning about the APIs and tools available for Text & Fonts, go to Getting Started With Text & Fonts, for a guided introduction and learning path.

For news, updates and links to other ADC content related to Text & Fonts, return to the Text & Fonts topic page.

Posted: 2005-11-10