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[oshfdk]

Ease of use was the main design constraint. To cipher, it requires a good look at a table to find a zigzag path that goes through the letters of a chunk of plaintext, which would explain the frequent small horizontal and vertical offsets, as if the scribe had been interrupted and had to take a look elsewhere before continuing. Deciphering is done by following the zigzag path defined by Voynichese glyphs interpreted as 2D coordinates (xyxyxy...) on the table. Not as easy as a simple mono-alphabetical substitution cipher but not as difficult as using a large nomenclator key, or cipher wheels, or code book, because the letters and Voynichese glyphs are easy to find in the table.

What would it take to break it? Let's assume, the plaintext is Latin (I suppose we can just try the top candidate languages one by one). As far as I understand the principle, there is a rectangular table of letters and we skip from a square to a square writing down how many squares we skip horizontally and vertically each time. If the table is kept the same for the whole book or at least for large portions of the book (and I think it's really pointless to consider other possibilities, as they gradually approach the one-time pad in being theoretically unbreakable), can we try to identify any patterns that would betray some of the properties of the plaintext? How do we pick where to start on the table? It would be impossible to decipher this without knowing the starting square, I suppose.