This page describes a word coloring service for the Voynich Manuscript (VMS), that is available through WWW.
The main form allows you to specify a page of the VMS, and a list of words with associated colors. The "DO IT" button then returns a copy of that page, with each occurrence of the selected words painted with the specified color.
The page must be specified in the EVMT numbering scheme: folio number, side ("r" or "v"), sometimes sub-page number. Examples are f1r, f14v, f89v2. Be sure to use the "official" number for pages that span multiple panels. For instance, the text of the nine-rosette diagram is acessible only as page f85v2, even though it spans six panels of the fold-out folios f85 and f86.
The database contains all transcriptions of the VMS that have been made public to date, including the the recent complete transcription by Takeshi Takahashi, the historical transcriptions by Friedman/D'Imperio, Currier, and Titlman (as recovered by Reeds, Guy, and Landini), and partial transcriptions by John Grove, myself, and others. Also available are a "consensus" version (defined by unanimous agreement of all the above) and a "majority" one (defined by majority vote of the same). Normally you will want to see only one of the versions, but you can also look at all of them together.
Most pages are annotated with "#"-comments, contributed by many people, which you can display or hide by clicking the appropriate box in the form.
By default, the server highlights only exact matches to the given words. Optionally, it will also highlight words that are similar to those given. There are two levels of similarity. The first one considers all gallows { p, f, k, t } to be equivalent, and also the EVA letters { a, o, y } (as well as the combination ei). It also ignores the EVA q prefix. The second level does the same, but also ignores differences due to ligatures and plumes, such as between { ee, sh, ch, r, s, etc. } .
The color table should be specified as one pair (word and color) per line. The color must be specified as in HTML, as six hexadecimal digits---two each for red, green, and blue. Thus, for example, ffee00 is a golden yellow, and 008833 is dark bluish green. Since the page background is black, you should avoid dark colors.
Please keep in mind that the coloring script runs on the same machine as our departmental server, and it takes several seconds for a typical page. Therefore, if you use this service through an automatic script, please insert a delay so that it does not ask for more than one page per minute.
If you don't like the defaults of the main form, just save a copy in your local area, and edit it to your taste.
The script is not very robust. If you think you ran into a bug, please let me know.
You may also browse the data files and Unix scripts which I used to build this service, as well as my notebook.