Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations

[Jorge_Stolfi]

following the visuals of the original are essential.

There are two distinct "flaws" of EVA that you and others seem bothered about:
(1) It uses more than one letter to record a single glyph (a "maximal set of connected pen strokes")
(2) It does not record certain details of the glyphs, like the shape and position of the plume on the Sh.

I addressed (2) in the previous message. 

Yes, whether (2) is good or bad depends on the assumptions one makes about the way the book was written and the intentions of the Author.   As I said in my Voynich Day talk, it would be nice if we could study the VMS "agnostically" -- without making any such assumptions beforehand; but that is impossible.  One must make prior assumptions in order to do any research; in any field, not just on the VMS.  One cannot get out of bed in the morning without making the assumption that the floor is still there where it was the night before, and did not turn into a big pool of ketchup.  

Even if you use VT101, you are making many such assumptions, like "the size of the glyphs does not matter, only their shape", "there are only two kinds of space, inter-glyph and inter-word", "the spacing between the lines does not matter", "it does not matter if a line ends a few mm before or after the right rail", etc.  And "the plume on a bench glyph can have only one of these six shapes".

As for (1): indeed, using two or more Latin letters to encode what we assume  is a single "letter" of the Voynichese script is an annoyance for some types of computer processing, like computing the frequency of "letters".  

But almost every alphabetic script in the world uses two or more letters of its alphabet to denote certain single sounds: "sh" in English, "gn" in Italian, "ch" and "oe" in German, "ll" in Welsh, ...  People who are native speakers of those languages are used to that kind of encoding trick since kindergarten, and thus are hardly bothered by EVA using it too.

EVA does record whether glyphs are connected or not, through certain simple rules. Thus "ch"or "Ch"  is always a single connected glyph (Ch), and so is "CTh" (CTh); whereas "ee" is always two separate glyphs (ee), and "ete" is three (ete).  Besides, Ch is two separate pen strokes, and CTh is four, which makes their EVA encoding seem almost logical.

On the other hand, that feature of EVA makes it possible to write all the common glyphs using only the 26 lowercase Latin letters; which is a big plus for computer processing.  Moreover, it makes it possible to record many rare glyphs, like CTy ("CTy"), Cky ("Cky")  or CTHh ("CTHh") without using additional computer codes or rules.  Additional codes are needed only for rare glyphs, that occur only once or twice in the whole book; and those could all be encoded as "?" without significant harm for most analyses.

And, finally, the EVA design decision to use only Latin letters made it possible to "pronounce" the words. This genial idea of Jacques Guy is very helpful when transcribing. One can mentally "read" a whole word from the scanned image as a string of sounds, and then type that into a file, as one would do when transcribing any other alphabetical language.  That is normally much faster and reliable than trying to memorize the shapes of the glyphs.  That is why the people who study Sumerian or Ancient Egyptian have made up sounds for all the glyph of those scripts, even though in many cases we have no idea of what those glyphs sounded like (or even if they were "letters" at all).

And, of course, everybody who has been in this corner of the internet for more than a week knows that we have absolute no idea of how the Author pronounced daiin, but it surely was not even remotely close to "die in".

In conclusion, which encoding is best for you depends on the assumptions you make and what sort of analysis you want to make.  Fortunately Rene's tools let you choose between any of the historical or current encodings; and they could easily accommodate more. "The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from"...

All the best, --stolfi