Developing an Encoding for Maya Hieroglyphs
Andrew Glass, Gabrielle Vail, Alexandre Bassi
This presentation examines the efforts to enable accurate digital representation of Maya Hieroglyphic writing, drawing on an interdisciplinary collaboration among specialists in archaeology, epigraphy, type design, and font engineering. Thousands of texts created by ancient Maya scribes survive across Mesoamerica on monuments, ceramics, portable objects, and codices, yet faithfully rendering their complex and context-dependent glyphs in digital environments has remained a significant technical challenge. This work integrates years of scholarly research with standards development through the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley to advance a Unicode-compliant encoding and font for Maya writing. The talk highlights how this combined technical and scholarly progress supports the reproducible representation of the script’s distinctive features using fonts and keyboards, while laying the groundwork for standardized digital access to Maya texts for researchers, descendant communities, designers, and educators.