No text, but a visual code

[oshfdk]

I can't read everything without spending more time on it than I have at present, but the part you circled is one word, 'ersten', erst//en (// for the stems).the line is '... Eppich ist warm // [in dem ?] // erst // en // grad // ...', Eppich is warm in the first degree

Thank you! So, if this herbal does split the words using the stem, there is no reason to believe this was impossible in the Voynich manuscript. Specific choice of glyphs that appear in narrow spaces could be explained, for example, if the scribe was using their line-ending (or word-ending) form, like the form used to indicate that a word will be continued on the next line. Something similar in spirit to: "thĩ || s ĩ || s || a tẽ || st".

Of course, I have an alternative explanation in line with my favorite distance ciphers, but there is no need to invoike it here, any type of character sequence/code/natural language can be broken apart and put in narrow spaces piecewise if we allow mid-word breaks, I suppose.