digital typography Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spac ...

, 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 The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from � ...

or in

runes Runes are the Letter (alphabet), letters in a set of related alphabets, known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks (also, see ''#Futharks, futhark'' vs ''#Runic alphabets, runic alphabet''), native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were ...

, which are not otherwise encoded as part of

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Organization

MUFI was founded in July 2001 by a workgroup consisting of Odd Einar Haugen (

Bergen Bergen (, ) is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county on the Western Norway, west coast of Norway. Bergen is the list of towns and cities in Norway, second-largest city in Norway after the capital Oslo. By May 20 ...

), Alec McAllister (

Leeds Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is the largest settlement in Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough, which is the second most populous district in the United Kingdom. It is built aro ...

), and Tarrin Wills (

Sydney Sydney is the capital city of the States and territories of Australia, state of New South Wales and the List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city in Australia. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Syd ...

). From 2006 to 2015, MUFI had a board of four members, consisting of the three founding members and Andreas Stötzner (

Leipzig Leipzig (, ; ; Upper Saxon: ; ) is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Saxony. The city has a population of 628,718 inhabitants as of 2023. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, eighth-largest city in Ge ...

). Currently the board consists of Tarrin Wills, Copenhagen (Chair), Alex Speed Kjeldsen, Copenhagen (Deputy chair), Odd Einar Haugen, Bergen and Beeke Stegmann, Iceland.

Character variants

In medieval texts, many special

ligature Ligature may refer to: Language * Ligature (writing), a combination of two or more letters into a single symbol (typography and calligraphy) * Ligature (grammar), a morpheme that links two words Medicine * Ligature (medicine), a piece of suture us ...

scribal abbreviation Scribal abbreviations, or sigla (grammatical number, singular: siglum), are abbreviations used by ancient and medieval scribes writing in various languages, including Latin, Greek language, Greek, Old English and Old Norse. In modern Textua ...

s, 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 Consortium. In the meantime, a part of the

Private Use Area In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

has been assigned for encoding, so these characters can be placed in

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s 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 Titus Caesar Vespasianus ( ; 30 December 39 – 13 September AD 81) was Roman emperor from 79 to 81. A member of the Flavian dynasty, Titus succeeded his father Vespasian upon his death, becoming the first Roman emperor ever to succeed h ...

project, which also deals with

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

Cyrillic The Cyrillic script ( ) is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Ea ...

, Georgian,

Arabic Arabic (, , or , ) is a Central Semitic languages, Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family spoken primarily in the Arab world. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) assigns lang ...

and

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

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 Latin Extended Additional is a Unicode block. The characters in this block are mostly precomposed combinations of Latin letters with one or more general diacritical marks. Ninety of the characters are used in the Vietnamese alphabet The Vie ...

(10 chars.), Supplemental Punctuation (15 chars.) and Ancient Symbols (12 chars.).

Fonts

, Junicode ( GPL) is the first typeface to cover all of MUFI 4.0, also in its italic face. Prior to MUFI 4.0, there were some 39 code point conflicts with Junicode. The Kurinto Font Folio has two typefaces – Kurinto Book UFI and Kurinto Roma UFI – that cover all of MUFI , including code points added after version 4.0 of MUFI. Kurinto also includes the code points of the CYFI and RUFI standards. There are three typefaces that are confirmed to cover all of MUFI 3.0. These are

Cardo A ''cardo'' (: ''cardines'') was a north–south street in Ancient Rome, ancient Roman cities and military castra, camps as an integral component of Urban planning, city planning. The ''cardo maximus'', or most often the ''cardo'', was the main ...

, Andron Scriptor Web and Palemonas MUFI. Only the last one comes in four faces (regular, italic, bold and both). LeedsUni supports all of MUFI 2.0.

Caudex A caudex (: caudices) of a plant is a stem, but the term is also used to mean a rootstock and particularly a basal stem structure from which new growth arises.pages 456 and 695 In the strict sense of the term, meaning a stem, "caudex" is most ...

, which is available at Google Fonts for embedding, claims to support most of MUFI 3.0, but is not listed on the MUFI homepage.The MUFI font page
/ref> Alphabetum has an almost complete coverage of MUFI 2.0 and some coverage of version 3.0, in addition to a complete coverage of MUFI 1.0. TITUS Cyberbit covers all of MUFI 1.0 and includes some additional characters at different places, as it predates the MUFI project. There is a project to make available MUFI characters, including version 4.0 ones, in

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latices are found in nature, but synthetic latices are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a wikt:milky, milky fluid, which is present in 10% of all floweri ...

Private Use Area

The MUFI set includes standardized characters from many areas in the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

and includes named character references ("entities") for use in

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; International Organization for Standardization, ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on t ...

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

, especially in TEI formats such as Menota. It also specifies many characters that are not encoded in Unicode, yet, in the Private Use Area which is designated for such use. When MUFI PUA characters have been accepted for encoding they are removed from the PUA in subsequent versions. As of version 4.0 there are the following PUA assignments, organized into several sub-areas.

Coordination

Similar initiatives have been founded for Early Cyrillic Symbols (''Cyrillic Font Initiative'', CYFI) and others. They are coordinated in the Linguistic Corporate Use Area (LINCUA). UNZ is a set of glyphs used in German blackletter fonts, their

typographic ligature In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters and used in English and French, in which the letters and are joined for the first ligature ...

s in particular, compatible with MUFI. Additionally, it provides some glyph variants needed for the representation of some historic German

handwriting Handwriting in Italian schools (XXth - XXIst century) Handwriting is the personal and unique style of writing with a writing instrument, such as a pen or pencil in the hand. Handwriting includes both block and cursive styles and is separa ...

styles, using the PUA code points F4F7…F4F8 and F500…F517.Bund für deutsche Schrift und Sprache – Normung von Sonderzeichen: "Unicode-gerechte Norm für Zusatzzeichen, Ausgabe 1"
(German)

External links

*
MUFI character databaseMedieval Nordic Text Archive
(extensive use of MUFI characters)

References

{{Unicode navigation Unicode Palaeography Medieval studies Digital typography