(11-08-2025, 08:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Granted, the result was, ahem, a bit disappointing. But note that it was the very first time I used that pen in at least 40 years, that the ink has visibly degraded -- it is more watery than it should -- and the paper is not ideal for it. (That black blot near top right was a pen loaded too much ink.) And of course I am probably a bit older than the VMS Scribe was. And, after two cataract operations, I have quite sharp vision but cannot focus any closer than 30-40 cm away.
Sorry for stating the obvious, but a magnifying glass, especially the wearable watchmaker kind, can certainly put the visual acuity for most people far above of what was possible for anyone in the 1400s, I don't think artificial lenses would be a problem here either. I used a magnifying glass for my experiment with the pencil above, just to make sure the vision part of the experiment would not become the weak link.
(11-08-2025, 08:07 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Because the original writing had severely faded, to near invisibility. Look at f73r, for example. Look for the faintest strokes; that whole page must have looked like that or worse when the owner decided to salvage it. Think of the retracing as the restoration of an artwork that must have been highly valued to the owner at the time. He naturally wanted the result to be close as possible to the original state. Think of how much money and time people and institutions are nowadays willing to spend to restore a painting, a statue, a mural...
My question was not why attempt retouching, but why perform it with what I see as nearly superhuman accuracy. After all, a text is a text. Unless the retoucher was somehow sure that a microstroke/microglyph encoding was used, I see no reason to try restoring every minute detail of every stroke. I would expect something more similar to what your attempt shows, than to what we see in the MS.
One possibility that could explain the perfect retouching in the VMS is if due to some properties of the ink and the vellum it would be enough just to add a drop of ink to any part of a dry stroke and it would fill the same shape, with the wet ink sticking to dry ink or oxidized vellum. However, the imperfect retouch job on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. seems to disprove this, with faint stroke outlines clearly visible next to the dark strokes (at least for Sh).