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

[oshfdk]

- ink defects. For example, gooey droplets of dark ink suspended in lighter ink

If this was the case, we would expect the dark strokes to be distributed much more irregularly, with many more transitions between light and dark occurring at random points in the middle of a stroke.  Instead were mostly see whole glyphs traced in darker ink.  The few cases of transition within a glyph generally occur in larger glyphs, or (more rarely) between whole strokes of the same glyph, like the left and right  of an a of Ch.

The way I see it, imagine a gooey blob of dark ink. When it's mixed with the lighter more watery ink, it will tend to cling to the inside of the quill and let the light ink seep around it, however when the scribe makes a strong/wide stroke, the gooey part is more likely to detach and smear on the surface along the path of the nib. This would create dark patches mostly in situations when the pressure is higher and these dark patches will transition to watery ink when the blob ends.

It's also quite possible to adjust wet strokes to achieve a smooth transition to a complex flourish. In this case the scribe can first write a thick short stroke and then lift the nib, move it a bit back and continue with a light pressure precise stroke. I can execute this maneuver when I want to write a complex glyph with a quill, so certainly this wouldn't be a problem for a professional scribe, I just don't know whether they would do this or not in practice. Wet ink gives you a lot of opportunities for merging and extending strokes smoothly and without any sharp transition. However if the ink of the original strong stroke was much denser, it won't mix perfectly and there can be an abrupt transition, I think.

- bad vellum surface.

The same objection above applies here too. Moreover, we should see many more cases of dark glyphs vertically adjacent across consecutive lines.  While those cases exist, they are rather rare.

This depends on the nature of the problem with the vellum. I know nothing about this, but imagine if the folio is covered with a thin film of material that won't let the ink react with the vellum. Strong strokes with considerable pressure may just physically scratch off this film and let the ink come into direct contact with the vellum, while lighter strokes won't penetrate this thin layer. There will be transitions at the point where the pressure falls below what is needed for properly scratching this film off. The variable thickness/sturdiness of the film itself would just produce a secondary effect here, with the level of the pressure of the nib as the primary factor, which in turn depends on what glyph the scribe was writing.

- out of order writing. For example, grille based ciphers[/quote]
If true, this would be a huge discovery for those who are trying to crack the "cipher" or prove that it is gibberish.

But it seems very unlikely too. Consider the first qo in that clip.  The o is practically obligatory after a q.  How could the "grille method" say "leave a space after a q to be filled later with a glyph to be determined"?
[/quote]

"o" is obligatory after "q", but "q" is not obligatory in front of "o". So, these two still could have been written independently.

On the contrary, glyphs that almost always stick together - like c and h, I think are usually in the same shade of ink?

And, again, it would be sheer insanity to run any encryption method with output directly to vellum. 

I don't find "sheer insanity" to be a priory incompatible with the Voynich MS. I don't think we should expect the creators of this weird manuscript to be primarily governed by rationality. Especially by rationality as we see it now.

The simplest explanation is that those dark glyphs were retraced some time (minutes or centuries) after they were first written.  Maybe by the original Scribe, to straighten a glyph that came out malformed or too faint.  Maybe by a later Retracer, because it was too faint. Either way, those dark glyphs are good evidence that perfect retracing is quite possible.

While the ink was still wet, it's possible to adjust the glyphs quite easily. However, if this changes the glyphs in any way, this is out of order writing too. It doesn't matter if the scribe wrote complete new glyph or changed parts of existing glyphs.