[Conference] Voynich Zoom CFP

[Koen G]

I'm just a lay person and he's been analyzing inks for years so I'm happy to give his opinions an appropriate level of deference, but I'd still like to understand why some of his statements about what is odd in the ink seem to be at variance with what I'm finding elsewhere including in the published literature.

True, and I don't find this too surprising since Barabe told us how he works. They basically have a catalog of reference pictures and graphs, and then try to match those to what they see. An exact match should be impossible, since every mixture is unique. So you often get these "clearly some gum, but...". 

When he says "this or that was surprising to me", he means that it was one of the billion possibilities he had not encountered before. It's kind of like when I see a manuscript with a unique art style, I might call it peculiar - but I might be unaware that there are many more artworks in this style and that it is, in fact, perfectly normal.