Medieval Unicode Font Initiative

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

In Medieval texts many special ligatures, abbreviation marks, and letter forms existed, which are no longer a part of the Latin alphabet. As these characters are mostly not encoded in Unicode the texts cannot be fully digitized, but ligatures have to be broken up into separate letters, and special abbreviation marks and letter forms must be discarded.

To prevent this perceived 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 mean time 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).

Web link

Medieval Unicode Font Initiative website