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

[oshfdk]

What about the leg of the p?

There is a clear double line or a loop there and there is some difference in the density of the ink on visible scans, but not huge. Given that this is the first letter of the page, I'd list possible explanations in order of falling plausibility to me:

1) This was an attempt to embellish the first letter of the page. The glyph is huge and a thin leg may have looked not good enough. There are other examples of embellished first gallows of the page in the MS, including clear wide features made of double strokes.

2) The first vertical stroke turned out a bit faint due to half empty/half dry quill or unmixed ink, similar to other known retracements at the beginning of a line, so the scribe decided to redo it.

3) This was a work of a proper retracer who decided that for some reason the leg needed fixing, but not the top horizontal bar, for example.

Do you really think option 3 is the most likely?

Why not retrace the legs in full, if both their upper and their lower part needed fixing?

Retracingtext or drawing is much slower and tiring than tracing it the first time.

Actually I think it's not. If we are talking about normal retracing that leaves obvious double strokes and that is attested in a few places in the Voynich MS and in other contemporary manuscripts, it's an easy job, you don't have to think about having enough space, what word to write, etc, so this is not much slower or even faster than writing. Basically this is a "follow the strokes" exercise that most kids perfect in elementary school or earlier.

If we are talking about mystical perfect retracing that leaves no unequivocal evidence, yes, this is a hard job in your eyes, and in my eyes it's practically impossible in the scope of the whole manuscript, so should be easily rejected by default.

You can see that in @nablator's example from f4r, line 3: why did the Retracer (who you claim is the Scribe himself) retrace only the C of that Ch, in the middle of a line?  Why not retrace the whole Ch?

Note that I think this example proves my point. The scribe there redid full complete strokes, even putting another horizontal bar on top of the existing bar. I was asking why the retracer in your example retouched each leg by using two short separate strokes instead of using normal full strokes.