08-05-2026, 01:11 PM
(08-05-2026, 12:54 PM)pfeaster wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.A more rigorous exercise in support of the line-break hypothesis might involve taking some actual section of the VMS and presenting for it (1) a hypothetical, statistically flat "author's draft" version of the text without line breaks, or with different line breaks; and (2) a simple set of rules for converting that text into a "scribe's copy" that displays line-based patterns identical to (or very close to) the ones we actually see.
And then a follow-up experiment: take the inferred "author's draft" and run it through the same set of copying / line-break rules, but now with the length available for each line increased to something like 1.3 times its current capacity. The line breaks will now mostly fall in different places. Does the "copied" result still display the same line-positional patterns as before?