This webpage is about the many places in the Voynich Manuscript (VMS) where glyphs, words, or entire lines were (or are suspected to have been) obfuscated by being painted over with a watercolor or tempera type of paint. The paint is often semi-transparent, given some hope that the original text and drawings can be recovered with the help of image processing techniques. Such recovery could improve the transcription of the text affect the interpretation of the figures.
???The writing on the VMS (and in many other manuscripts) shows great variations of /weight/, which includes both the width of strokes and the darkness of the ink. There are noticeable weight changes along a single stroke, between strokes of the same glyph, between words on the same line, between lines on the same page. There may be significant variations also from page to page, and from section to section.
Instances of ink traces being painted over are rather common. Here are some annotated examples.
*NOTE*: The claims in image captions are all personal guesses with varied degrees of confidence. For brevity, they are stated as facts; however, the reader should assume disclaimers such as "apparently", "probably", "it seems that", etc. before every claim that is not totally evident from the images.
Last edited on 2025-10-25 22:21:04 by stolfi