Rendering the Unencoded: A Digital Typeface for Book Pahlavi

Amir Moslehi

As part of the Missing Scripts projects, I developed a typeface for the Book Pahlavi script, the writing system used for much of the Middle Persian corpus. In this talk, I will present the interdisciplinary process behind the project and discuss how type design can serve as a meeting point for linguistics, palaeography, codicology, calligraphy, script encoding, and font engineering. One of the central challenges was the development of a character set capable of representing the full range of Book Pahlavi texts. The script presents unique difficulties due to its complex ligaturing behavior, historical variation, and the fact that it has not yet been encoded in Unicode. To address this limitation, we experimented with an alternative encoding strategy based on the Arabic script model, mapping Book Pahlavi characters onto Arabic code points as a temporary framework for digital text processing. The project involved multiple cycles of design, testing, and refinement to achieve reliable text rendering while taking advantage of OpenType features. This iterative process required balancing historical accuracy with technical constraints and usability considerations. By sharing the successes, challenges, and lessons learned from this work, the talk will offer insights into the practical realities of bringing an unencoded historical script into contemporary digital typography and will highlight broader questions surrounding the preservation and digital representation of the world’s written heritage.

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