MUFI: The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative
New: Mini MUFI search and input tool.
The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative is a non-profit workgroup of scholars and font designers who would like to see a common solution to a problem felt by many medieval scholars: the encoding and display of special characters in Medieval texts written in the Latin alphabet.
MUFI was founded in July 2001 by a workgroup consisting of Odd Einar Haugen (Bergen), Alec McAllister (Leeds) and Tarrin Wills (then at Sydney). The members of the workgroup communicates primarily by e-mail, but have occasionally met in Leeds (July 2002 and 2003). The first MUFI group meeting was held in Bergen (30-31 August 2003), the second in Lisboa, (10-12 March 2005), the third in Bonn (12-13 June 2006), the fourth in Mainz (23 June 2008), the fifth in Bergen (7-8 April 2011), and the sixth, also in Bergen (8-9 September 2015). The MUFI board meets on an ad hoc basis since Corona. As of August 2006, MUFI has a board of four members.
Why Unicode?
Unicode is the international font standard. Version 15.0 covers almost 150,000 characters in living as well as historical scripts. It is fully supported by computer platforms like Linux, Mac and Windows. There is simply no alternative to Unicode.
Many characters needed by medieval scholars are already defined in Unicode, but a great number of other characters, and especially abbreviation marks, are missing. The Private Use Area in Unicode may be used for encoding missing characters, but we would like to see as many special characters defined in the official area as possible.
For this reason, the MUFI groups is pursuing two lines, (a) coordinating the allocation of medieval characters in the Private Use Area and (b) proposing missing medieval characters to Unicode.
Search the character database using the search field at the top left, or browse using the links at the top.
Download a snapshot of MUFI’s data as: csv or json (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Disclaimer
This site is managed by scholars in Medieval studies with the aim of establishing a consensus on the use of Unicode among medievalists. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Unicode.
Board 2016–
Tarrin Wills, Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, University of Copenhagen (Chair)
Alex Speed Kjeldsen, Arnamagnæan Collection, University of Copenhagen (Deputy chair)
Odd Einar Haugen, Bergen
Beeke Stegmann, Iceland
Board 2001–2015
Odd Einar Haugen, Bergen
(Chair)
Andreas Stötzner, Leipzig
(Deputy Chair, since 2006)
Alec McAllister, Leeds
Tarrin Wills, Sydney/Aberdeen
