The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative: Past, Present and Future

The Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI) turned 20 last year and has become the de facto standard for encoding medieval manuscript characters. When MUFI started its work Unicode was not universally adopted as a standard but is now ubiquitous. It now incorporates into an international standard a great many of the characters recommended by MUFI. In the last twenty years new technologies and standards have been widely adopted that provide alternative solutions to using the Unicode Private Use Area, the current solution adopted by MUFI. This paper reviews these options and how they might be adopted by MUFI in the future, potentially making the encoding of medieval characters even easier and more standardised.