ARTIFACTS IN THE TEXT.

[Anton]

Looking at strikes, dots, lines and smears will not tell you anything about the evolution of a character.

It may or may not tell. It is true that it might not tell. E.g. if English "d" is comprised of "c" and "l", that does not mean that d = c + l. But one is not sure that with Voynichese we are dealing with plain text, to begin with. So analysis of the graphical structure of the glyphs may serve as support to hypotheses - the most recent example is Cham's curve-line system. Artifacts just serve as insightful hints and disclaimers. Like, when one sees a white crow, that effectively disproves the statement "all crows are black".