[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Leaving the Retracer issue aside, about the the bulk of the text having been written by two or more Scribes, I would say that

1. One could in principle objectively establish that there are multiple handwritings, by statistical analysis of glyph shapes.  However, whether those handwritings belonged to distinct  people is a separate theory, that needs its own evidence.   My own hadwriting has changed an awful lot over the years, and still varies a lot depending on my state of mind and rest, posture, writing instrument and medium, etc.  The variations are much bigger than what we see in the VMS.
   
2. The "splitters" who saw multiple handwritings may have succumbed to "confirmation bias".  Namely, once they got the hunch that there were multiple Scribes, they set out to find evidence confirming it -- differences in glyph shapes -- while ignoring the much stronger evidence that contradictd it -- the similarities in glyph shapes.  And one similarity, in particular, is the range of variation of glyph shapes within the same page, or even the same line.  That is, the writing everywhere is very similar because it is similarly variable.
   
3. Surely there was some Author who decided to write this book, decided what would be in it, and invented the script.  The Author must have drafted the text and sketched the figures on paper first; it would be insanity to write everything directly from his head onto vellum.  Then he/she gave the draft and sketches to a Scribe who clean-copied them to the vellum.  If there was only one Scribe, he/she may have been the same as the Author.  If the Scribe was a different person, the Author had to teach him/her the Voynichese alphabet, and had him/her train writing it until the Author was satisfied with the result.  If there was a single Scribe, he/she could be an Author's secretary, apprentice, relative, etc.  But if there were five or six Scribes, the Author had to recruit, teach, and train all of them; which makes the idea quite a bit less likely.  Moreover, these multiple Scribes also had to conspire and train to write in similarly sloppy ways -- so similar that at least one handwriting expert and many amateur ones would swear that there was just one Scribe.