Decomposition of the "gallows" characters

[-JKP-]

There's no quill problem with the preceding or succeeding letters

As Wladimir suggests, this may be due to gallows being inserted in another pass.

Yes, possibly.

If this document is created in more than one pass, sometimes the ink will match and sometimes it won't, so it wouldn't necessarily be easy to detect it all the time.


Darker ink sometimes means a different pot of ink or that the scribe is getting close to the bottom of the original pot of ink (the heavier particles tend to settle and often create a darker ink) but if the line were written as one line (and then a second pass on the same line) or as one paragraph (and then a second pass through the second paragraph), the ink color and density might be more consistent.


Most of the instances of text that hint at characters having been added that I've seen so far have characters added between word-tokens or at the end of word-tokens but who knows, perhaps the process happens with gallows, as well. The entire VMS document has odd spacing between words (and sometimes between characters) compared to every other manuscript I've ever seen (which is hundreds of them).

Almost from the beginning I've wondered why the spacing is strange. I thought at first it might be because the scribe was looking away at another copy (a wax tablet, for example) and back, away and back, which would interrupt the natural flow of writing, or that the unfamiliarity of writing code letters (compared to natural language) might be diverting some of the scribe's attention away from the natural flow of text, but perhaps there are other explanations—maybe if it's done in more than one pass it would explain the odd spacing.



If this were a fraud document, it would probably be more rather than less consistent, since fake text doesn't have to mean anything and the person could write it more comfortably. I'm still not 100% certain there is meaning behind the text, but the odd spacing is one small detail, along with many other small details, that gives me hope that the text says something.