UTW 2025

Fonts
Scripts & Encoding

An Accidental Map of the History of Writing

Minh Nguyen

on  Wed, 13:00in  for  40min

OpenHistoricalMap is an open source map of the world throughout time with as much detail as contributors are willing to research. Since OpenStreetMap prioritizes toponyms in the local language, OHM prioritizes names in the contemporary local language. By accident, we have created a use case for displaying a variety of historic languages and writing systems that haven’t ever gotten much attention in digital maps. Learn about the project’s editorial standards how they have resulted in changes to fonts and map rendering technologies and even required some unfortunate character encoding hacks.

 Overview  Program