29-01-2016, 09:07 AM
Thanks for the response. One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to make a serious effort to find something in VMS. Not much exposure to the manuscript, but I have watched a few documentaries and read a book or two. I've also downloaded the images from Yale and am using them as a screensaver. So basically just starting to think about an approach.
The page numbers seemed odd to me since they were tucked in around the illustrations in a few places and I didn't see Arabic numbers elsewhere in the text. The idea of preserving an aging copy of an older manuscript seemed like a solution to the problem of page numbers, although I suppose later rebinding could account for it too.
With regard to the "lack of errors" I will admit I fell into the trap of repeating a VMS marketing phrase. I realize that you can't tell if there are errors if you can't tell what it says. And there could be a glyph that translates as "dang it what I meant to write was" followed by the correction (even if it is a copy of an older document you could still use that glyph.) In fact one of the additive glyphs could be a "delete this character" markup. Too soon to say, but something to keep in mind.
My main reason for asking the question had to do with the illustrations as much as how clean the text was. If it's a copy, the illustrations are copies too. Copying illustrations seems a much more subjective process to me. So the idea that we can look at the pictures and figure out what the words should be seems very optimistic to me. In fact if it's actually in code the pictures could be pure misdirection; my opinion is that they just aren't the best illustrations, but again, too soon to say...
The page numbers seemed odd to me since they were tucked in around the illustrations in a few places and I didn't see Arabic numbers elsewhere in the text. The idea of preserving an aging copy of an older manuscript seemed like a solution to the problem of page numbers, although I suppose later rebinding could account for it too.
With regard to the "lack of errors" I will admit I fell into the trap of repeating a VMS marketing phrase. I realize that you can't tell if there are errors if you can't tell what it says. And there could be a glyph that translates as "dang it what I meant to write was" followed by the correction (even if it is a copy of an older document you could still use that glyph.) In fact one of the additive glyphs could be a "delete this character" markup. Too soon to say, but something to keep in mind.
My main reason for asking the question had to do with the illustrations as much as how clean the text was. If it's a copy, the illustrations are copies too. Copying illustrations seems a much more subjective process to me. So the idea that we can look at the pictures and figure out what the words should be seems very optimistic to me. In fact if it's actually in code the pictures could be pure misdirection; my opinion is that they just aren't the best illustrations, but again, too soon to say...