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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

I'm not sure this would happen then all over the page... The question is why these unusually visible frequent split strokes persist across all shades of ink, both very dark and quite light.

Well, I find it unlikely that the Scribe would write a whole page with a bad quill or ink, without trying to fix the problem. 

My answer to the question is that I think that there is something wrong with the vellum on that page.  Possibly it is rougher than normal, so that either the ink between the tines could not catch on it, or the Scribe had to apply more pressure to the pen, causing the tines to spread too far apart and breaking the ink bridge between them.  Possibly it was more hydrophobic than normal, so that the ink in the gap between the tines would not stick to the vellum as it should.
   
On this clip of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (lines 1-7, east end)  I still see at least two rounds of retracing, Rt1 and Rt2, roughly corresponding to the two ink colors.  But, as you say, both have terrible trace quality.  

The original (Rt0) traces survive only in the tails of some y and q glyphs (A) and some Ch ligatures (C ), and a bit of the flower outline (B).  I think I see a bit of original strokes alongside retraced strokes in a couple of places, like (J), but I am not very confident in that.  

The best evidence for retracing, I think, are the glyphs that were turned into once-only weirdos, like (M); or possibly turned into other glyphs, like the y in (L) that I suspect was originally an o but the Retracer thought he saw a tail, and "restored" it. 

The t gallows (K) is intriguing.  Even if we assume word spaces after oto an/or around the y, we get a very atypical word with that t.  But note the exceptionally large feet of that glyph.  I suspect that the original was an ee, but the tops of the es were lost and the Retracer thought he saw something above them.  So he "restored" the ee into a t...

But indeed, the pervasive split strokes and faltering traces are indeed not the result of writing with an almost-dry pen.  If that were the case, the traces would quickly become lighter as writing continued, and after a few glyphs the scribe would have to recharge the pen from the inkwell.  Instead the traces remain uniformly bad for a whole line or more.

But notice that the traces look much better, almost normal, inside the region roughly bounded by the red line, even as writing goes on without noticeable break across that line.  I take that as evidence that the bad traces outside that area are due to bad vellum.

All the best, --stolfi.