Scribes and authorship of the text

[magnesium]

Very interesting!
How did you handle scribe 4, whose output is mostly along circles? The word boxes in voynichese.com are not along the direction of writing, but along the page orientation (horizontal, vertical). Did you skip these?

I have a first set of boxes along the direction of writing, but the word boundaries are not yet very accurate. Would you be interested in using these?

I used the voynichese.com bounding boxes without any corrections, so Scribe 4's results are almost certainly affected by the fact that many of those words are not horizontal. By far the biggest expected issue would be a lower-than-expected average aspect ratio. The voynichese.com bounding box orientation lists some of Scribe 4's words as being taller than they are wide because those words are written vertically relative to the page orientation. I'm fully aware of this as an issue. Milder versions of this problem almost certainly affect other pages. If the text on a given line is written at a slight angle relative to the page's true horizontal, the resulting bounding boxes for the words will on average be slightly bigger than their writing-direction bounding boxes were. 

I have some ideas for how to correct for this. Assume that a word's "true" bounding box oriented along the direction of writing has width w and height h. Also assume that the direction of writing is at some angle q relative to the page's horizontal orientation. The ratio of the area of the "horizontal" bounding box, analogous to what Voynichese.com provides, to the area of the "true" bounding box is given as:

R = ((w*sin(q)+h*cos(q))*((w*cos(q)+h*sin(q))/(w*h)

At small q, it's not so bad, but it's a non-negligible problem.

As a next step, I want to try and automatically provide an initial correction at the line level by calculating the average slope of a given line of text, converting that to an angle, and then applying a line-average correction using the formula above treating the slope angle as q (or at least as an input parameter for how to calculate q). That doesn't correct for the Scribe 4 circles, but it could tighten everything else up.