WASTE is a fully Unicode-savvy text engine for Mac OS X, suitable for a large variety of applications requiring advanced text display and editing functionality.

WASTE stands for WorldScript-Aware Styled Text Engine, although nowadays, that acronym is no longer accurate, since WASTE 3 no longer relies on WorldScript technology, but uses ATSUI instead.

WASTE 3 draws from more than a decade of experience in multilingual text processing, but it is completely reengineered for Mac OS X, using modern technologies such as Unicode, ATSUI and Quartz 2D.

Having worked with developers for several years, we know flexibility and customizability are often key requirements for a text engine, making "one size fits all" solutions awkward to work with. That's why WASTE is customizable on many levels: it provides several callbacks for controlling various aspects of the text editing process, it features an embedded object architecture, and starting with version 3, it allows you to define your own formatting attributes. And, for the ultimate level of customization, the full source code is available for licensing.

Speed is another major concern for us. Layout and rendering speed can make the difference between a snappy, fun-to-use application, and a sloppy user experience. WASTE 3 was designed for speed from day one: its carefully crafted data structures allow fast lookup of key information, its extensive use of generic programming and STL containers allow modern compilers to generate tight code, and the ATSUI objects needed for text layout are lazily allocated and cached between uses.

The WASTE SDK
The WASTE SDK contains a Mach-O framework which you can incorporate into your application for evaluation purposes. It is fully functional, so that you can try it out before purchasing a license.
The SDK also contains a sample application (with source code) which uses WASTE.
Before you distribute your application which uses WASTE, we ask that you sign our license agreement. Please contact us for details.

WASTE 2.1 Compatibility Layer
Wrapped around the C++ core engine is a thin procedural layer that provides compatibility with applications written to the WASTE 2.1 API. If your application uses older versions of WASTE (1.x or 2.x), this means that WASTE 3 preserves your investment, allowing you to adopt a modern text engine with little or no changes to your source code.