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

[oshfdk]

We seem to be stuck in the same place...

This is not the way I see it, my views have progressed from "this could be retracing" (or even, "You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.") to "this is unlikely to be retracing" and then to "this is certainly not retracing" and for this last step your suggestion to compare it with the Book of Hours was helpful, just not in the way you probably expected. So my views are evolving, but not towards converging with yours.

You seem to believe that

• perfect retracing is impossible for any substantial amount of text or drawings.  
  
• the cases that I claim are incomplete retracing are due to some pen and/or ink defects that cause the trace weight and/or width to change abruptly during a single stroke, or from one stroke to the next.
  
• the cases of obvious imperfect retracting in the VMS (like the daiin on f1r) are only half a dozen or so, and are all cases of backtracing.
  

Yes, this is a good summary with two caveats:
- I have no strong beliefs about whether the few known clearly visible retracings are all by the original scribe, I just think it's likely some of them are, just because they can be easily explained by starting a new line with an almost dry quill.
- I think words "imperfect/perfect" are misleading here, so I'd define it more specifically as "obvious differently shaped light stroke outlines visible (or not visible) next to the dark stroke outlines in the TIFF scans". The key factor here is that the outline of two strokes shouldn't match perfectly in shape, as this would impossible for human hand/eye coordination at this level of magnification. I'd call daiin retracing on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. an example of "state of the art" retracing, this is what "perfect" retracing looks like to me. What you consider "perfect" retracing looks to me like an inhuman feat.