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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

It required only a firm hand, sharp eyes, and the patience of a monk.

Nice story, but this good fellow somehow always missed, for no reason at all and despite his excellent skills, the start of the strokes (when pressure started to be applied), the flourishes and macrons (fast)...

He missed them on purpose.  Retracing those would make the writing uglier, and would make the smaller abbreviations illegible.

Note that the thin gray parts are quite consistent.  If the color switch was just an accident of ink flow, shouldn't there be examples of dark brown plumes and light gray main strokes?

Here are some cases where that junior monk missed the aim:
       
       
   

In the last example above, note that the thick stroke is traced downwards, while the light plume is traced up to the right.

Here is a case where the dark ink was pulled along a thin trace, because the latter obviously was more wettable than the paper:
   
Note that the thin trace belongs to the following line.   Which means that all the thin traces on the page were written first, and then overwritten with the dark ones.

The next two examples show the third pass, where mistakes (probably by the junior monk) are corrected with even darker ink:
   
   

And here, just for curiosity, is the Proof Reader fixing the Latin of the Red Scribe, in the closure of one of the texts in that book.  
   
The correct text (IIUC) should be

• Explicit dyalog9[=us] Bonavẽ[=en]turæ inter animã[=am] et rationem
  
• Here ends the dialogue of Bonaventura between soul and reason
  

On the first line, the Proof Reader capitalized the B of St. Bonaventura, fixed the "Bone" to "Bona", and (IIUC) fixed the declension to the genitive, "turæ" instead of "ture". 

On the second line, he fixed the part that looks like "raa", with a distorted second "a", to "rati" (J3,J4).  This last error by the Red Scribe is similar to what I see in the VMS: a Retracer, not knowing the language, sometimes replaces a glyph by a similar one that does not make sense, or by a weirdo that is not even in the alphabet.

All the best, --stolfi