Basic use

Use the New command in the File menu to open a new window.

Type or paste in any text into the top box, labelled Input , and press the Tab or Enter key.

The text HFS+ will then appear on a red or green background. Red indicates that macOS running on an HFS+ file system will change that text during normalisation. The version of your text shown next to that gives the normalised form which will be used for file and folder names.

If the background is green , then no change will take place with normalisation: both the original and normalised forms are identical.

The four boxes below that give the four different normalised forms, using hexadecimal numbers in UTF-8 format (Unicode). Macs with HFS+ use NFD , but Linux uses NFC , for example.

The bottom box gives a full summary, which you can Save as a text file using that command in the File menu.

You can open as many new windows as you want, and can copy and paste between them and other apps.

Back to Welcome

Normalising text

Non-Roman text

Oddities

Technical information

The Eclectic Light Company – https://eclecticlight.co