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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Why does this happen?
It's because of the quill. ... This tells me that the writer did not understand not only the ink and colour, but also the writing tool.

I am no expert on the matter, but I know quite a bit about how quills and iron-gall were prepared.  And I have quite a bit of experience with illustration by hand, with many different media including steel pen and India ink.  And the original Scribe surely did know his craft.  (Except that I am convinced that he did not use iron-gall ink, in spite of what McCrone said.  The possible reasons can be discussed elsewhere.)

One cannot dismiss all those ink weight anomalies and mangled glyphs with a blanket claim of "expected ink flow variation by an unskilled scribe".   For most of the cases that I labeled in those clips, this explanation simply does not work.  Ink flow cannot turn an s into a d or an y into an o.  

It would be like "explaining" cuneiform writing as pigeons walking over wet clay: it could be stretched to work for some glyphs here and there, but not for the ensemble...

All the best, --jorge