How much work to write an enciphered manuscript v one with complex meaningless text?

[Mark Knowles]

Marco brings in a valid point - in fact, when you write a meaningful text, you have to produce the content, to begin with, - which is significant effort in itself. When you write a meaningless text, you don't bother about the content at all.

So the effort is maximized when you produce a meaningful enciphered text.

I believe you misunderstood what Marco was saying or I did. If you were copying from another text and you applied a simple one to one cipher, i.e. this symbol maps to this letter of the alphabet, then writing the Voynich would be relatively quick whereas producing meaningless text could be as much work. Even in fact if you made up text as you went a long e.g. "once upon a time there was a man called john" which has a meaning though in this context is essentially meaningless.

My point was that I wonder whether the author might as well have produced a readable simple substitution cipher text than produce a nonsense manuscript as some suggest the Voynich is. Wouldn't the readable manuscript have served the same or similar purpose? Or even if the cipher was a little more complex would there be much more effort to produce the manuscript. So why spend the effort producing meaningless text than something meaningful?