Re: VMs: Re: Moot points, getting long

[Gabriel Landini <G.Landini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

On Sunday 08 August 2004 10:45, GC wrote:
> The standard keyboard offers slots for 94 representations before
> going into the {alt} keys, so I've never had the assignment problem
> described by Gabriel. 

Just to clarify. 
1. Since the eva font was made there seems to me that there has been a change 
in the reserved characters by Windows. For some obscure reason, a few higher 
ascii codes are not possible to display in an html document (and I think that 
one used to be able to).
For instance in Win 98 SE,  IE could and Netscape could not display one of the 
doodles in f1r (or the way round). So even if one can see the doodles using a 
word processor, the result was not the same in a browser. Then I discovered 
that Konqueror (KDE browser) cannot display *any* eva in html, despite that 
the font is available to linux, but Mozilla in a previous linux install could 
display it after some command line magic (I haven't tried Mozilla in my 
current install).
One of the problems seemed to be the ttf format. So I have converted the file 
to an updated ttf format and re-assigned the position of those problematic 
weirdoes. There will be an updated font sometime soon that can -hopefully- 
displayed correct in any browser.

2. The difference between <e> and <E> (connected <e> from the bottom) has been 
part of eva since the beginning. There are a few of these marked in the new 
transcription, but perhaps not all. 
I wonder if there is some confusion between the interlinear file from Jorge's 
site with the new eva (unpublished) transcription.
The first one is a merge of many previous transcriptions all in different 
alphabets which were converted to eva. Since eva is a superset of Currier and 
FSG, the result can be represented unambiguously in eva using --as everybody 
knows by now-- Bitrans.
The other transcription sees more characters than FSG and Currier alphabets 
and includes all the weirdoes, bracket notation, new readings, etc. and can 
be conveniently processed using vtt to extract for instance a particular 
folio, or all labels in the herbal B, etc.
So it would be unfair to judge the eva transcription (that you have not seen 
yet) based on the interlinear file; they are not the same thing.

3. We ended up not to using all available keys to map the characters because 
we adopted the capitalisation rule from Frogguy, so for some character we 
need both the upper and lower case. Furthermore there are more than 94 
characters in our list of weirdoes+connected characters, so unfortunately the 
whole set would not fit anyway.

> I can represent the glyphs down to those that number 2 or higher by
> using a standard keyboard, and if anyone gives it some thought, the very
> appearance of the Voynich should say that this *should* be the case, not
> the extended, arbitrary and unnecessary complexities of the EVA alphabet.

If anybody produces a better alphabet that explains better the vms and gives 
new insights, it will be quickly adopted. The sooner somebody comes up with a 
new alphabet, the less we'll have to discuss all this. 
It may be handy to take a look at other heavily agglomerated alphabets like 
curva and gava (if the info is not at Rene's site -I can't remember- I'll 
happily send the Bitrans tables) so one avoids reinventing the wheel. It 
seems that these 2 cover more or less what you have been describing.

4. The plumes... We have discussed this before :-)
I still cannot be sure I see as many as you mention. But perhaps the new 
colour images this could help to solve this. This is indeed a problem that 
would require to proofread the ms again. 
However one could save a lot of time: looking for <sh> and correcting only 
those (4543 instances) is about six time less work than reading the entire ms 
(which is 233500 or so characters).
A similar problem is with the in-between forms of <s> and <r> (about 140 of 
those in my reading). Another one is the variation of <p> and <f> end curl, 
and there are more...

I do not believe that anybody can come up with a perfect reading, but having 
several independent readings allows one to see where the disagreement takes 
place.

Cheers,

Gabriel
______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list