[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[oshfdk]

So we seem to agree that on those (and several other) words there are both dark strokes and very faint ones.  The dispute is whether both were drawn at the same time, and came out different because of ink flow effects; or the word was written once, was or became faint, and then was carefully, but not always completely, retraced with dark ink.  Is that a good summary of the issue?

Yes, this is a good summary.

In this image, the dark strokes create two invalid glyphs, a reversed "i" with serif and an incomplete infinity symbol.  I don't see how those symbols could be interpreted as valid glyphs with some parts missing. 

The infinity symbol is rare, but still appears a few times in the MS. Probably this is just e and o jammed together. There has been a discussion about these fused symbols, I think it was Dobri who started it. Here's the thread You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and I'm attaching a sample image of fused characters I made for that thread. So, yes, it's rare, but I don't think it's an invalid character in the sense that by producing it the scribe indicated their lack of knowledge of the script.

As for "reversed "i" with serif", I think there are a lot of base minim/curve variations in the MS, so I'm not sure this symbol is particularly strange, it's just not the most common version. If needed I can try hunting for more examples, I don't have them ready.