The claimed Voynich page

[Fabrizio Salani]

But really, has anyone ever seen a freehand drawing faithfully copied with identical proportions?

What is the upper limit for the date of creation of that page?

Again, I see that page as a work of art by someone who was fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript and its story, but not enough to learn the alphabet.  He or she cared only about the looks (which explains the "beautification" of the plant), but saw the text as just "some unreadable text".

If I wanted to make that thing, I would print an image of the page on office paper, with a laser printer, making sure that the size was correct.  

Then I would rub the back of the print with a pencil, creating an improvised carbon paper.  Then I would place the paper over the vellum, and trace the outline of the plant the the characters with a pencil or ballpoint, pressing hard enough to transfer the graphite from the back side of the paper onto the vellum.

That would leave a faint reproduction of the thing on the vellum,  which I would use as a pencil sketch. I would do the plant and the text with paint and ink over that faint sketch.  Once the paint and ink were dry , I would remove any traces of the sketch with a soft eraser.

(And yes, I used this method several times in my "budding artist" years...)

This sketch would be faint and, by itself, would not be very accurate.  On the plant, that would not matter, because any artist would draw the correct shape, down to the small details.  Even more accurately than the VMS Scribe did himself. But on the characters the artist had no idea of what were the right shapes, and checking the original image at every character was too much boring work.  

Moreover, he or she did not have a quill or calligraphy pen, so he or she used a brush to draw the characters.  Which contributed to their distortions.

I think this scenario is consistent with product. In particular, with  the text block being on the right place, but individual characters being crooked.

All the best, --stolfi

Correct, the problem is that on the parchment treated with lime, there is no trace of charcoal, graphite, or silver, and there are no grooves in the characters or the drawing (the grooves are visible on the back of the horizontal lines). The fact that the characters are not precise to the original is that, if you look carefully, for some glyphs, the writer interpreted them as characters from the Western alphabet. This happened in ancient times (so they explained to me) with copyists (both church and lay craftsmen) who, when copying manuscripts, for ease or for the sake of translation (aside from the expressly desired change of meaning—see the various secular Bibles), transformed some characters in Ancient Greek, Amharic, Coptic, Aramaic, Byzantine, or other languages into the characters they were familiar with. When I asked the reason for these differences, I was told that more than one person was involved in composing the manuscripts: some had a talent for drawing (even differentiating between copyists who were skilled at drawing people and those who were only skilled at drawing animals, vegetation, structures, and text - see the "Bible of Borso D'Este"), others for writing, and the rubricators who traced the red lines for titles or individual words. But it's not a given (especially if they were lay craftsmen, it becomes very likely) that they understood the text they were writing.
However, the theory of a fantasy, created for pure entertainment, cannot be ruled out, as can many others;
after all, this is the most fascinating aspect of the world of the Voynich manuscript.
I send you details at 600 DPI
Best.