Words around text intrusions/image breaks and towards the start/end of lines

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So  d,s,a,o,y  all represent pitch?

I don't think so for d and s.  They seem to be more "solid" than that.  For their anomalies, there explanation would be something else.

But I am not claiming that a o y  represent pitch. Only pointing out that there are possible explanations for their anomalies that do not require LAAFU.  

From their number and pattern of occurrence, those could perhaps be weak vowels of Arabic or some other Semtic language. There are some clues that suggest such a language, but others that contradict it... 

And what about  p ? Is it to be a pitch character also?...  p  seems to be a nonsense character at the start of words. Dropping  p from the start of every word likewise gives genuine words that appear frequently. It seems to me that the writer uses this character at the start of a paragraph just to emphasise a new start. ... Almost no non-paragraph text ( labels, radials, circulars ) has [puffs] as the starting character.

Yes, the puffs (p and f) are almost certainly fancy versions of gallows, possibly combined with other letters, possibly not in a systematic way. Like our Latin capitals or italics, they seem to be used to mark the first line of paragraphs and/or important words, like proper names, names of the plants, foreign names, etc.

And, if you take every word of Mandarin that begins with (say) z, and delete the z, you get a word that is still very common...

It does make for rather a lot of pitch characters in an alphabet that is already low on letters.

The script probably uses digraphs to denote certain sounds.  In You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. each gallows or bench (ch and sh) can take an e suffix modifier, and the codas aiin ain etc are distinct letters. So I have easily 40 "letters" in the alphabet.