Ink/pen dynamics and the rhythms of writing

[Koen G]

To me, this suggests that the text and drawings on each of these pages were likely created during the same session, with the same faulty pen.  I haven't tried to study this type of correspondence methodically, but a quick perusal seems to support a hypothesis that the pictures and text on any given page tend to share the same overall pen-and-ink profile (including "mixed" profiles, as on f73v).  I wonder if there are any really obvious exceptions.

Another page with noticeable line-doubling in both the Voynichese text and the drawing is f17r.  Notably, the marginalia at the top also features line-doubling, most obviously in the top of the [a] in [malhor].

If this is true, it would be the first indication I know of that text and image are contemporaneous. It would add two things to our understanding:

* Scribes are the artists -> this is already what Lisa concluded after the research I did with Cary on different plant image types.
* A page was filled in with text immediately after the image was completed. This feels unusual to my amateur intuition. I would also welcome more informed opinions on this.

I was expecting the marginalia to be contemporaneous as well (this research will be published at some point), and likely by one of the original scribes. What I wasn't necessarily expecting is that the marginalia were written at the same time as the rest of the page. And on a page where the pen was apparently causing issues. This aligns well with my suspicion that the marginalia are pen tests though.