[Blog Post] Rightward and Downward in the Voynich Manuscript - Patrick Feaster

[pfeaster]

Another side of the subject is the possible impact of page layout. In particular, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I noticed that image-breaks (frequent in Herbal pages) appear to have an effect on nearby words. The extra-long lines in the Pharma section might also be of interest.

That data you gathered about behavior around image breaks is really intriguing -- reminiscent of line-break behavior to a point, but also distinct from it.

I'm unsure how best to integrate breaks around images into the kind of rightward/downward display I've been experimenting with, but I did try one thing that was relatively easy to do: making plots of glyphs appearing immediately adjacent to intruding images, either to the left or right of them.  In my other plots, I'd been treating intruding images as interchangeable with "ordinary" vord breaks.

Here's a plot of [<->o] in blue and [o<->] in green for all folios combined, where <-> represents an image intrusion.

   

I'm not entirely sure whether there's enough data here for apparent patterns to mean anything.  But it looks as though [<->o] appears later on average in lines than [o<->] does.  If so, that would seem to suggest that patterning within lines transcends image intrusions to at least some extent, such that behavior around intrusions is partly constrained by where in a line the intrusions occur.

For whatever it's worth, here's a similarly structured plot of *all* image intrusions.