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

[oshfdk]

The retracing inside the stain used broad strokes and dark ink similar to that of the retouching pass Rt2 on other pages. However, the person who tried to fix this damage (RtX) may have been a separate Retracer distinct from the retracings of other pages.
   
Unlike the general restorer Rt1, RtX retraced the glyphs that had been less affected by the spill.  Note that he refrained from fixing some glyphs that are still quite legible, like © and (D), and incorrectly restored others, like (E) and (F).  This indicates that RtX did not know the Voynichese alphabet.

BTW, I think here I agree with your analysis. Looking at (E) it appears likely that this scribe was not familiar with the script or had little experience writing it. This happened to me all the time when I tried writing Voynichese, I would write aii as something like Latin all/aii. Also of note is that the retracer didn't touch up individual strokes, but redrew the whole glyphs, this is what I would expect from any person retracing damaged text.

But by now I'm so much accustomed to challenging your statements, so this would feel incomplete without some nitpicking. Here goes:

Note that he refrained from fixing some glyphs that are still quite legible

The fact that they are legible now doesn't mean they were legible when the stain was fresh. I don't think whatever stew this was, it was designed for visual stability over the centuries. It could be initially much more saturated in color and blended with the ink much better. Maybe it's only now that it's completely dry and aged, we can finally see these traces of ink again.