The Voynich Ninja

The spacing of words in the Voynich is somewhat uneven, has anyone compared this with the spacing in other contemporary manuscripts? Is the Voynich particularly unusual in this regard?

(24-09-2025, 01:36 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The spacing of words in the Voynich is somewhat uneven, has anyone compared this with the spacing in other contemporary manuscripts? Is the Voynich particularly unusual in this regard?

IIRC Rene and/or someone else has been creating a file that has the image coordinates of each word in the VMS.  It should be feasible to obtain the distribution of word space widths from that  data.

As for other manuscripts ... my guess is that they will be all over the place, from manuscripts that have very uniform spaces to those that have extremely variable ones.

It has been observed that a decent scribe, when he got close to the end of a line, would instinctively stretch or shrink the text so that the line would end precisely on the right rail.  Modern text processors do that by adjusting the width of word spaces, and maybe even character spaces.  Medieval scribes could also stretch or shrink the glyphs themselves.

All the best, --jorge

I was exploring my steganography hypothesis.and the sequence in which words were written in the manuscript.

Taking "once upon a time there was a cipher"

We have:


"                           once                upon              a      time                        there                   was                     a                  cipher     "


Then inserting filler words we have:


"tice opos cime t once thephe upon o waer a cie time wae waer there oner onre was t cipe onon a tere cere cipher tas"