Transliteration and interpretation of the Voynich MS text

[farmerjohn]

Many VMS-related conventions were developed during typewriter days.

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Off-topic, but still related to VMS keyboard-mapping strategies in the computer age:

When I created my VMS documentation font (a font I designed from the ground up specifically for writing VMS papers), I used ALT characters for some of the letters. It's not as comfortable as typing regular keyboard letters, but is much more convenient than switching fonts several times per line.

It is not a transliteration font (it is not ideal for this purpose). It's a professional-quality publication font designed to facilitate the process of writing academic papers about the VMS. I made an effort to retain diacritical marks from major languages. This was a significant challenge since it leaves very little room for VMS glyphs, but I was able to come up with a workable system.

The uppercase VMS glyphs are shorter than the originals (this is a necessary compromise so that it can be interleaved with regular text), but they are readable as long as the font size is not too small:




Currently it works on OS X. Windows has an antiquated system for alternative keys and I don't have a solution yet but I may tackle it eventually.

It's a Roman-style font (I also have a non-serif version but I haven't double-checked it). There are hundreds of Roman-style fonts extant, but I designed my own because I wanted something the looks good on the screen and in PDFs. Many attractive Roman-style fonts look good in print but are not clear on the computer screen. I wanted this font to overcome that problem.


I plan to release it to the public at no charge for noncommercial scholarly use. Ideally, it should be widely disseminated so that the publishers (Wiley, T&F, Springer, universities, etc.) have it in their systems so they can accept PDFs and .doc files for peer review and publication. In the meantime, it can still be used to create PDFs for upload to various research sites and preprint servers.

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During coronavirus quarantine I also made an attempt to create Voynich font, which on the one hand is based on EVA (so mostly compatible with current instruments) and on the other hand is able to render properly s (differently as single s and as part of sh), ckh (so you don't need to type cKh or {ckh}), complex ligatures, etc. That is far from easy task. The results may be found You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..