This paper discusses some of the challenges faced by an editor when encoding and interpreting the script of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana (V), the Galician-Portuguese songbook kept in the Vatican Library. It also proposes some solutions, embracing the idea that the goal here is to create an online resource that meets the informational needs of the scholarly community. The paper will focus on a single grapheme, y, in that this is a useful means of illustrating the difficulties provided by both the humanist minuscule and the particular copyist here when transcribing the text for computational processing in a database.