Bad news: f116v was substantially mangled by Retracer

[Jorge_Stolfi]

For me personally it doesn't matter much if the text was retraced or not, as long as the retracing was faithful to the original. For bulk of the text available in MSI scans there are no signs of "bad" retracing, so it's good either way for me.

I agree, both with the observation and with the conclusion -- but only with regard to the Voynichese text.  The Retracer (the main one at least) was generally careful to trace the characters faithfully, and he clearly knew the alphabet (even if just from observation).  So the question of whether and how much of the Voynichese text was retraced has little impact on studies of it.

But I believe that retracing of the illustrations was much less careful, and the Retracer (at least one of them) deliberately altered or added many details.  Like the "showercaps" on many nymphs and many plant details.

And I now believe that the "restoration" of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. was a disaster, because whoever did it assumed that the faded text of lines 2-4 was Latin script when it quite probably was Voynichese.  Therefore this possibility must be investigated and settled as well as we can before spending more time trying to decipher that "Latin" text.

All the best, --jorge