Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

In digital typography, the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) is a project which aims to coordinate the encoding and display of special characters in medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet, which are not encoded as part of Unicode.

MUFI was founded in July 2001 by a workgroup consisting of Odd Einar Haugen (Bergen), Alec McAllister (Leeds), and Tarrin Wills (Sydney). From 2006 to 2015, MUFI had a board of four members, consisting of the three founding members and Andreas Stötzner (Leipzig). As of 2016, Tarrin Willis is the single board member.

In medieval texts, many special ligatures, scribal abbreviations, and letter forms existed, which are no longer a part of the Latin alphabet. As few of these characters are encoded in Unicode, ligatures have to be broken up into separate letters when digitized. Since few fonts support medieval ligatures or alternative letter forms, it is difficult to transmit them reliably in digital formats.

To prevent the possibility of corruption of the source texts, the eventual goal of the MUFI is to create a consensus on which characters to encode, and then present a completed proposal to the Unicode authorities. In the meantime, a part of the Private Use Area has been assigned for encoding, so these characters can be placed in typefaces for testing and to speed up the later transition to the final encodings (if the project is accepted). This was originally based upon work done by the TITUS project, which also deals with Greek, Cyrillic, Georgian, Arabic and Devanagari characters, As of Unicode 5.1, this proposal has been made, covering 152 characters, and most of these (89 in all) have been encoded in the Latin Extended-D block. Others are in the Combining Diacritical Marks Supplement (26 chars.), Latin Extended Additional (10 chars.), Supplemental Punctuation (15 chars.) and Ancient Symbols (12 chars.).

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