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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It is difficult enough to trace your own handwriting written in pencil with a ballpoint pen.

Indeed.  The retracing must be much slower and more careful than the original writing.  And that is why a handwriting expert can often detect forgery in a signature at first glance, unless the forger himself is an expert.  The slower speed results in broader and more jittery traces.

And that is why we can detect retracing of plumes and tails on the VMS.  Retracing causes the plume to become thicker, with a blunt end, instead of the smooth tapering "mousetail" created by a quick swish of the pen.  And it helps when a Retracer who does not know the alphabet chooses to trace a plume or a gallows loop in the wrong direction.

By the way, the only difference between these two Japanese katakana characters, "shi" and "tsu" 
         
is the sense in which the big stroke is to be written. That is why learning the Japanese (and Chinese) script requires learning the order and direction of the strokes, not just the final shapes.  Even when using a pencil or ballpoint.

It is the same ink [...] simply too thick.

It is probably the same ink, at least for the first round of retracing.  See below. 

I am aware that stroke weight varies while one is writing -- darker right after the pen is dipped, normal for a while, then fainter as the pen runs out of ink.  And that the Scribe himself may go back to text that he wrote previously, to correct mistakes, redo characters that cane out fainter, etc.

But stroke weight is not the only criterion I use to decide whether some glyph, word, or page was retraced.  Crooked plumes is only one of several clues that can add up to make the conclusion unavoidable. 

This only indicates that one of the writers was not familiar with the consistency of the ink and colour as it should be.

On the contrary, the original Scribe was obviously an experienced "quil driver", since he could write neat text only 1.5 mm tall or less.  He was poor only at drawing figures.

This happens throughout the book.

Yes.  Because the first round of retracing was applied to the whole book.

Consider this:

1. There are many characters and drawings that have visibly faded to the point of near invisibility, and now can be read only with magnification and contrast-stretching.
   
2. There is no reason to believe that those cases of fading are the worst possible.  There must be strokes that have become completely invisible.
   
3. Indeed, there are many places where only part of a glyph or figure detail is visible, even with those tools.  Thus the missing part must have faded completely
   
4. There is no reason to believe that the those cases of extreme and total fading happened only after Voynich bought the book.  They probably happened many decades or centuries before that.
   

Are you still with me on that?

Now imagine that one of the many owners of the VMS before Voynich, who believed it to contain who-knows-what great secrets,  saw that the text was fading all over the book.

What would he do? Sigh and philosophically recite tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse?

[Answer in the next episode.]

[Hint: suppose that the VMS was a painting instead of a book, with the same level  of degradation.]

All the best, --jorge

PS Koen, is there a way to insert attached images with a specified size? Like [attachment=NNNNN width=100], except that it works?