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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Do you really think option 3 is the most likely?

 
Not less likely thna your 1 or 2...

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.

That could apply to the Scribe himself, because he would not have cared whether the retracing was visible.  It could be the case of the daiin on f1r.  But the hypothetical Rt1 restorer was hired to restore the manuscript as accurately as possible, so he would have tried harder to follow and cover the original traces.  And more so on the text than on the figures.

And even for the Scribe himself, retracing would definitely have been slower than writing, even if he tolerated some parallel tracing.  The shape of his glyphs varies a lot from word to word.  Again, when writing he could have "let his hand do the writing" at full speed, but when retracing he had to use slower traces and eye feedback.

If we are talking about mystical perfect retracing that leaves no unequivocal evidence, yes, this is a hard job in your eyes

But, first, there are many cases of darker glyphs in the middle of lighter text.  You would consider them "backtracing", cases of the original Scribe himself going back and retracing glyphs that he had just written; and I can agree that many of them are just that.  But they show that it is quite possible to retrace many glyphs without leaving "unequivocal evidence" other than the darker ink...

And, second, there are in fact thousands of cases where the Rt1 Retracer left evidence of his work. Like bits of Rt0 traces poking out under his traces, plumes retraced in the wrong direction and therefore with wrong width, glyphs turned into weirdos, double traces in illustrations that make no sense, ...  

Note that I think [@nablator's] example proves my point. The scribe there redid full complete strokes, even putting another horizontal bar on top of the existing bar.

But the ligature is normally part of the h, not of the C...