Hacking at the Voynich manuscript - Side notes
520 Gordon Rugg's hoax hypothesis

Last edited on 2004-05-27 09:37:37 by stolfi

INTRODUCTION

  [SUPERSEDED BY Notes/110]

  Gordon Rugg recently dscribed in /Cryptologia/ a method for
  generating random text very similar to Voynichese, using
  1550 technology.  This note analyzes his solution.

LINKS

  Seeting up the links:
  
    ln -s ../../compute-freqs
    ln -s ../101/dat

OBTAINING THE DATA
  
  Fetched the software-generated data files from 
  http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voynich/,
  and extracted the EVA text:
  
    software_repro1.html -> soft-1.eva
    software_repro2.html -> soft-2.eva
    software_repro3.html -> soft-3.eva
    
  Transcribed the pages produced with the "full manual version of
  feb/2003", from JPEG images at
  http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/cs/staff/g.rugg/voynich/images/
  
    f1r.jpg -> hand-1r.eva
    f2r.jpg -> hand-2r.eva
    f2v.jpg -> hand-2v.eva
    f3v.jpg -> hand-3v.eva
    f7r.jpg -> hand-7r.eva
    f8r.jpg -> hand-8r.eva

  Images f8v.jpg and f9v.jpg could not be fetched (broken links).
  I warned Gordon and he sent me new copies.
  
  Concatenated all those files and placed them in the same directory as the 
  other text samples for statistics:
  
    ~/voynich/work/Texts/rugg/sfw/main.raw  (software version)
    ~/voynich/work/Texts/rugg/hnd/main.raw  (manual version)
    
  For each of these directories:
        
    Added (by hand) "@" directives t main.raw, producing main.org.
  
    Processed main.org with Makefile, producing main,evt, main.wds, 
    main.wct, main.txt