How good is your pareidolia?

[oshfdk]

But those ligatures are only ~0.2 mm wide.  So it seems that the scribe did in fact manage to connect the first e and the h with ~0.1 mm of accuracy, most of the time.

My limited experience with the quill suggests to me that the accuracy you need in this case is the same as the width of the stroke or even a bit less, so about 0.25mm, which is very precise, but manageable. This works because of the tendency of liquids to merge in a smooth roundish shape, this has something to do with the physics, but I won't pretend I fully understand the process (I can look it up, I'm not particularly interested now). After you write e, if the ink is still wet, you can touch with the quill anywhere close enough to the tip of the stroke (you don't even need to hit it precisely, so roughly 0.25x0.25mm area is ok) and move the quill tip and two strokes will merge into a single smooth shape. This will produce a somewhat different angle depending on where exactly you started the next stroke, but if you look at the collection of ch in my previous post, you can see that the connection between e and h has many variations, this is likely because the scribe hit different parts of e when starting h stroke.

Yet this text shows the same irregular mix of light and dark strokes as the rest of the text on this page.  I would say that it was retraced too, but surely you will say that it is normal ink-flow variation.   Would you accept the o in the daro as evidence for my claim?

I would accept this o as the only piece of a block of very thin letters (0.15 mm strokes probably) where there is something that could be interpreted as retracing. Which to me speaks a lot about the whole retracing hypothesis.

It is physically possible that someone retraced the text over hundreds of pages with the meticulousness and precision of a money forger. But why?