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# NSMultibyteGlyphPacking

A constant for glyph packing.

```
enum NSMultibyteGlyphPacking
```

## Overview

Cocoa stores all text data as Unicode. The text system converts Unicode into glyph IDs and places them in 1-, 2-, or 4-byte storage depending on the context. To render text, you must convert the storage into a format the text engine understands. The following constants describe the glyph packing schemes the text rendering engine can use. They are used to extract glyphs from a font for making a multibyte (or single-byte) array of glyphs for passing to an interpreter, such as the window server, which expects a big-endian multibyte stream (that is, “packed glyphs”) instead of a pure `NSGlyph` stream. They’re used by `glyphPacking`. With Quartz, the engine always expects the format to be in 2-byte short array, so `NSNativeShortGlyphPacking` is the only format currently in use.

## Topics

### Packing Options

[`NSMultibyteGlyphPacking.nativeShortGlyphPacking`](/documentation/AppKit/NSMultibyteGlyphPacking/nativeShortGlyphPacking)

The native format for macOS.


---

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