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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

Good retracing job?

Of course not.  That was just a Scribe who chose to use a pen that would write whole lines in invisible traces.  Because the contents of the text was not important; what mattered to him was the artistic look, the contrast between strong dark and ghostly white writing.  To remind the viewer that life is a chaotic succession of highs and lows, pleasure and sorrow, excitement and boredom...

Seriously, some of the ink variations on that page are normal ink dynamics: traces are dark at first, get fainter gradually as the pen runs out of ink, then suddenly get darker when the pen is recharged.  We can even tell that the ink charge would not last for a whole line.

But the characters that are darker than their neighbors on both sides are indeed retraced.  Specifically, here they are cases of what I call "back-tracing": the Scribe himself goes back and retraces some earlier character, usually because it came out too faint, or misshapen, or incorrect, usually with a freshly recharged pen.  That is the case of those characters that you annotated as "Rt2" in your clip.  And yes, that is a good retracing job, not "superhuman" at all.  But if you look very closely, you can see a couple of bits of "Rt1" ink poking out from under the "Rt2" retrace.  Like inside the loop of the first "L" on the second row.

As for the extremely faded "Rt0" ink, that was probably written in red or some other color.  Note that the three most faded parts seem to be titles, quotes, or emphasized.  The line just below those "Rt2" characters is

  ... scripto secreto: Wann ...

And so I think that the colored ink probably was an organic dye (like cherry juice).  Or maybe invisible "secreto" ink, that the reader was supposed to reveal by some method.  Either way,  that ink may have looked good at the time, but like any organic dye it faded over time, just from exposure to air and sunlight.  It preserved better (but darkened) in the gutter, where the sun don't shine...

All the best, --stolfi