The Voynich Ninja

(13-10-2025, 10:09 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There is a similar but more complicated "incident" on page f105r:

The star of this paragraph seems to be a bit too up from the paragraph starting point.

(13-10-2025, 01:30 PM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The star of this paragraph seems to be a bit too up from the paragraph starting point.

Yes.  But such deviations are seen throughout the section.  Here is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the Stars section.  The third column VPOS  {NN}±{D.D} says that (in my opinion) line {NN} is the head of the parag that the star belongs to, but its position is ±{D.D} lines off from that line.  

My guess is that the Scribe wrote all the text first, and then drew all the stars (or vice-versa); and did not quite realize that each star had to be aligned with the corresponding parag head.  Or lost track of which lines were parag heads.

I have spent some time trying to find the true parag breaks (earlier I posted the reasoning for one of the pages), and currently I think there are 327 parags but only 323 stars (thus 4 parags without stars).  It is possible that stars with double tails count as two stars, but then there may be too many stars.  

To complicate matters, there is one page where the Scribe seems to have mashed several parags together, instead of breaking line between them.  

  At 14:00: "Hey, you are wasting too much vellum! Do you think it grows 
    on trees? Write more compactly!"

  At 15:00: "Hey, what are you doing?  You must break lines between parags! 
    Oh God, what did I do to deserve this?  They don't make scribes as they used to!

All the best, --jorge

The writer(s) came off tracks at several occasions, there is quite a bunch of misalignments.
Some circular forms are also, ahem, a bit battered.
There seem to be not any auxiliary lines for the text, no ruler was used and not always a circle in use for the round forms.

So this `sophisticed, top-secret, alchemistic, encrypted & coded´ manuscript was produced at least in a hurry or rather careless. Which would be some contradiction to the most popular assumptions...

(23-10-2025, 03:30 PM)Stefan Wirtz_2 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.There seem to be not any auxiliary lines for the text, no ruler was used and not always a circle in use for the round forms

Indeed.  I gather that professional scribes would score guiding lines with a dry blunt stylus or blade. When they were used, they should visible under grazing light.  The BL 2014 images (and the Multispectral ones) were taken under oblique light, yet there seem to be no trace of such guiding lines anywhere.  Anyway, the baselines of the text are generally curved, tilted, and unevenly spaced.  

(The only exception I can remember is page f67r2, which has three lines of text delimited by four guiding lines.  The lines are with a ruler; one in ink, the other three with a dry point or very fine pen or pencil. However, those guiding lines are not equidistant, nor precisely parallel: the spacings, from top  to bottom, are ~5, ~8, and ~6 mm at ~1/4 of the way from the  left margin, and ~4.5, ~7, and ~5 mm at ~3/4 of the way.)

As for the circles, they generally were drawn with compass, apparently with an ink attachment that made very fine strokes.  However, either the compass was not very solid or the vellum was shifting under it, because several circles fail to close, with ends missing each other by ~1 mm or more.  Also, some parts of some circles were retraced by hand, as revealed by the thicker and jittery trace.

And the Scribe did not know how to divide a circle evenly in more than 4 parts.  On that same page, the lines between the sectors are drawn with a ruler, but they don't go through the center of the circles, and the sectors have substantially different angular widths.   In other diagrams, including the Zodiac wheels, the nymphs, rays, or other elements were placed around the circle with no planning; so that they start out with too much space, then get cramped up at the end, and sometimes the leftovers have to be added outside the diagram.

All the best, --stolfi

I don't want to be annoying, but I think it's very logical:



Here, too, a second version was added.

At the top it says: ytain At the bottom it says ytcheb this are two Versions of the same word. The writer don't know, wich Version is the correct one, while copying the text.

And then take a look at the following text and compare the two based solely on the rough typeface. Here, too, the author simply used a second version—which was not unusual at the time.

If you're interested, see my comments: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., especially the last few posts...