Useful Exercise?

[pfeaster]

Well, restoring the ciphertext would be a rarher laborous and tedious work. It has been deciphered but it doesn't solve everything. The first challenge is to read it - the ink has faded quite badly in some parts of it.

Fading due to apparent water damage does leave parts of the ciphertext (and the "original" in general) either wholly illegible or very difficult to make out.  Short of multispectral imaging, just viewing documents in this condition under a black light can be helpful, but I'll assume that's not an option here.

The contemporary decipherment is in a darker ink, fortunately, and consistently visible.  But there's some difficulty in aligning it with the ciphertext.  The first line of decipherment starts immediately above the beginning of the ciphertext, and it ends partway across the page, so I suspect this particular line of decipherment corresponds exactly to the (partial) line of ciphertext below.  If so, the decipherment would then take up about 2/3 as much linear space as the ciphertext, which seems like a plausible ratio.

The next two lines of decipherment each apparently represent more than one line's worth of ciphertext, since both are written with two lines of ciphertext in between.  But it's unclear whether each of these lines corresponds exactly to two lines of ciphertext -- the line breaks may just not correspond at all.  The vertical spacing of the decipherment for the rest of the page still seems loosely consistent with the ciphertext having a 2/3 horizontal space ratio to it.

So aligning the decipherment and the ciphertext is another significant challenge.  But working from the very end backwards, here's a guess as to the values of a few cipher characters, based on one that may be repeated in first and fifth position (though the two tokens might not be of the same type, given the difference in the stroke at upper right):