The short version: Virtual Typex is a gloriously techy bit of onscreen kit, that simulates all the moving components of a Typex cipher machine in a visually satisfying way. Though see the final section below for the caveat. One nice piece of Typex history they got right which I think may well be described here for the first time is the wiring for the basic Typex reflector.
The diagram above shows that on Typex, the input was wired reversed with respect to the reflector. This means that while A input pin is in line with the A reflector pin, B sits opposite Z, C-Y, D-X.. To my eyes, the problem is that the standard-issue empty rotor i. And it was my best understanding that it was these triangular notches that trigger the rotation in the next rotor along.
But the other major PAAFU behaviour is that single leg gallows glyphs appear predominantly on the first line of paragraphs, and only rarely elsewhere these are known as Tiltman lines, after my hero John Tiltman. You can see this throughout the Voynich Manuscript, right from Herbal A page f3rβ¦. This is an issue that has been floating round for decades, and I would be surprising if it had originated even from John Tiltman.
More recently, Rene Zandbergen discussed it on voynich. So, the challenge to anyone trying to come up with some kind of theory for the Voynichese text is simply to explain why this unexpected behaviour is the way it is. What kind of mechanism could be behind it? The first thing to point out is that we have two single leg gallow behaviours very frequent at paragraph starts, and very frequent on the top line of paragraphs which overlap somewhat.
But whatever the explanation for p being so strongly biased to this paragraph-initial position, I think we should try to separate the single-leg-paragraph-initial behaviour from the single-leg-top-line Tiltman behaviour. But what of top-line-but-not-initial Q20 words? So if we discount all the paragraph-initial words, words containing single leg gallows are about One of the interesting things that has been noted about these single leg gallows on the top line of paragraphs is that they seem to often appear in adjacent words.
