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Typefaces

Typefaces that borrow from Maya writing, and fonts made of the glyphs. Checked November 6, 2026. Prices and licenses change, so check with each foundry before use. Back to Writing and time.

Latin letters with a Maya feel

Latinotype, 2016

Kawak

Javier Viramontes drew it in the Type@Cooper Extended Program, and the Latinotype team finished it. The foundry calls it a sans inspired by glyphs from the Tzolk’in ritual cycle, built on what it names the Mayan super-ellipse. The glyph look sits in the rounded square forms. Six weights, each with an italic.

Kawak

Latinotype, 2012

Tikal Sans

Twenty styles, for text and display. Its curved strokes end in sharp edges. The foundry draws these from the virgula glyph, which it glosses as “the spoken word.” The Light, Regular, and Medium weights suit long text, the foundry says.

Tikal Sans

Sudtipos

Kukulkan

A serif by Raúl Plancarte, for headlines and running text. The letters come from Roman forms. The Maya link is in the companion set, Kukulkan Ornaments, with 150 icons, symbols, and frames drawn from Maya hieroglyph iconography.

Kukulkan

Parker Creative, 2023

Mayaglyph

Hand-drawn letters, each one uneven, as if taken off a stone. An outline version comes with a solid background version for layered designs. For display. The seller lists it as an “Aztec aesthetic” font, which pairs two cultures that were not one.

Mayaglyph

Azteca Design

Maya Glyphs

A display face in capitals. Free for personal use. A commercial license comes from the designers.

Maya Glyphs

Fonts made of the glyphs

George Douros, 2020

Maya

Part of his Unicode Fonts for Ancient Scripts. It covers the glyphs in J. Eric S. Thompson’s A Catalog of Maya Hieroglyphs (1962). It types Thompson’s signs, not the alphabet. Free for personal use. The file comes by request on Google Drive.

Maya

Bonneville Electronics, 2024

Mayan Days

By Scott T. Smith. A set of top affixes, the signs set above a main sign, after the Thompson catalog. The keys follow the catalog order. It is one part of The Mayan Project, a system of more than 2,000 glyphs, and it can be used alone.

Mayan Days

Maya writing and Unicode

Maya writing is not in the Unicode Standard, the code that lets a script travel from one computer to the next. Both glyph fonts above follow Thompson’s 1962 catalog. The Unicode work builds new sign lists.

On June 19, 2026, Carlos Pallán, Andrew Glass, Céline Tamignaux, and Nick Sahler sent Unicode a proposal for the writing of the three Postclassic codices, with 496 signs. It is marked as a draft in progress, not for citation. It notes that at least one more proposal is under way, to add signs from earlier periods.

Alexandre Bassi, a French type designer, is part of a project with the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley to make a typeface for Classic Period hieroglyphs. He spoke on it at ATypI 2026 at Stanford on May 28, 2026. The team brings together archaeology, linguistics, computer science, and type design. The typeface is meant for scholars, for anyone curious, and for Maya communities today.

Sources