Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) Coordinating Medieval characters in the Latin alphabet

摘要

The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) is an informal network which aims to coordinate the usage of the Private Use Area (PUA) of the Unicode Standard among medievalists. The PUA can be used for characters not yet part of the Unicode Standard, but unless there is a coordination of code points in this area, any file exchange will entail an extensive search and replace process of PUA characters. MUFI now coordinates code point allocation in several font projects, e.g. TITUS (Germany), Junicode (US), Alphabe-tum (Spain) and LeedsUni (UK). In addition to coordinating code point allocation in the PUA through the MUFI character recommendation, MUFI participants work with other medievalists in writing proposals to Unicode for the inclusion of new characters. So far, two proposals of more than 100 characters have been met with approval by Unicode, and the characters in these proposals are likely to become part of an upcoming version of the standard. Moreover, participants in the MUFI network are active in developing fonts including medieval characters, many of which can be downloaded free of charge from the MUFI website. These fonts are compatible with all major computer platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) and may be used for the display of documents encoded in XML and other open formats, whether in print or on the web.