Volume 5 of the Grapholinguistics and Its Applications series contains the first part of the Proceedings of the Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century Conference, which was held online from June 17 to June 19, 2020. This interdisciplinary conference brought together researchers from various disciplines interested in the topic of writing, including linguists, computer scientists, typographers, font designers, psychologists, archeologists, educators, and others. The topics range from theoretical aspects of grapholinguistics, to the history of writing systems, typographetics, graphemic and graphetic methods in speculative fiction, sociolinguistics, emojis, communication with unknown intelligences, contemporary art, exotic scripts, sinographemics, written representation of sign languages, applications of computing, translation, conversion, confrontation of scripts, magical writing and many more topics.