Tools for the Statistical Study of the Voynich Manuscript
The following programs are used for statistical studies of the VMs:
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BITRANS , by Jacques Guy, makes it easy
to substitute any given group of letters for another in any common ASCII
text. Its most common use is conversion between different transcription
alphabets for the VMs, although it has many other possible uses.
A program to deal with lines more than 255 characters long and configuration
files to convert between different transcription alphabets for the VMs
are also included. (All MS-DOS.)
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ColSep , by Jon
Grove (no "h"), a tool for (at least partially) removing colour from
pictures, based on a “colour deconvolution” algorithm originally devised
(I believe) by Voynich researcher Gabriel Landini, and implemented as a
Photoshop plugin by Voynich researcher Jon Grove.
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Here are some examples
of images processed with this algorithm, as well as the author's copy of
ColSep , which he may have updated.
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"Wikipedia’s .8bf page suggested that Helicon
Filter - a relatively little-known non-layered graphics app from Ukraine
- happily runs Photoshop plugins. I downloaded the free version, copied
Jon Grove’s filter into the Plug-ins subdirectory, and it worked first
time. Neat! Well… having said that, Helicon
Filter is quite (read “very”) idiosyncratic, and does take a bit of
getting used to, but once you get the gist, it does do the job well, and
is pleasantly swift." (Nick Pelling.)
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Findnull , by Brian Tawney, finds characters
likely to be nulls within a text (MS-DOS with C++ source, 22 KB.)
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FQ (Son of Monkey) , by Jacques Guy, is two
programs for making frequency tables of word relative position (for MS-DOS,
48 KB).
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MONKEY , by Jacques Guy, is a program for
calculating the entropies of texts (MS-DOS, 36 KB). Note that this
program will not load a text file larger than 35 KB; if you try, it loads
and analyzes only the first 35 KB. Also, entropies of orders higher
than second are not accurate, which is not too important since they would
not be representative in any case for texts of this size.
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Perl scripts by Takeshi Takahashi.
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Voynich Font , by Gabriel Landini, True
Type (Windows) and Type 1 (Unix). This only works with the EVA transcription
alphabet (101 KB).
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VFQ , by Jacques Guy, uses the Sukhotin algorithm
to identify the vowels in an unknown writing system or a simple substitution
cipher (MS-DOS).
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Voytools , by Michael Winkelmann, is a
set of Perl programs for handling the Voynich interlinear transcription
archive edited by Jorge Stolfi. They can be used on any system
with a Perl interpreter (537 KB.)
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VTT (Voynich Transcription Tool), by René
Zandbergen, removes comments in parentheses, page numbers, and other things
to prepare a text corpus of the VMs for statistical analysis (source code,
MS-DOS executable, Solaris 2.4 executable). This is to be used with
transcriptions in the EVA alphabet in the "standard" EVMT project format;
examples are on the Voynich
Manuscript Stuff site of Jorge Stolfi. Note that not all
features may work properly with the latest transcriptions. Michael
Winkelmann's Voytools above supersede this program in many ways.
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WordPerms (Word Pair Permutation Analysis)
, by Marke Finche, analyzes occurences of word pairs and their reverses
in a text (MS-DOS, 6 KB.)
Web-based Voynich Tools:
Return to Main Voynich Page
November 24, 2008