Quote: Geoffrey: 1) The word break in the ms text could be in the wrong place, either accidentally or deliberately,
I agree that wrong word breaks should be on the list of possible explanations, but I don't think there are any accidental word breaks in the VMS (if there are, the incidence is very low).
I've created four transcriptions of the entire manuscript and have noticed that the position of glyphs within tokens is very consistent throughout the manuscript. If it deviated, it would be noticeable.