When generating a seed in 2.7.x there is now an option to "extend this seed with custom words".
Is there a maximum allowable length of characters for the entire string of "custom words"?
Can I use special characters in the "custom words"?
Does it matter if I input special characters in other encodings besides UTF-8?
I believe electrum uses BIP39 for the seed generation and found this about its spec.
From mnemonic to seed
A user may decide to protect their mnemonic with a passphrase. If a passphrase is not present, an empty string "" is used instead.
To create a binary seed from the mnemonic, we use the PBKDF2 function with a mnemonic sentence (in UTF-8 NFKD) used as the password and the string "mnemonic" + passphrase (again in UTF-8 NFKD) used as the salt. The iteration count is set to 2048 and HMAC-SHA512 is used as the pseudo-random function. The length of the derived key is 512 bits (= 64 bytes).