Paleography is the study of ancient handwritten manuscripts to date the age and to localize
ancient and medieval scripts. It also deals with analyzing the development of the letters shape. Ancient
Jawi manuscripts are one of the less studied. Nowadays, there are over 7789 known Jawi manuscripts
were kept in custody of various libraries in Malaysia. Most of those manuscripts were undated with
unknown author and location of origin. This important information can be discovered by analyzing the
different type of writing styles and recognizing the manuscript illuminations. In this paper, we discuss
the paleographical analysis from the perspective of computer science and propose a general framework
for that. This process involves investigation of Arabic influence on the Jawi manuscript writings,
establishing the paleographical type of the script, and classification of writing styles based on local and
global Jawi image features
