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

[Jorge_Stolfi]

There is plenty of evidence.For example: correcting something that doesn't actually need correcting. Unless people can't tell the difference between a ‘4’ and a ‘q’.All clear?

On the top row with two qo: I suppose that those images were only meant to show what a "normal" qo looks like? Or the difference between a sharp-corner variant and one with a slightly rounded left corner?

On those two qo images, I do see evidence of retracing: specifically, the general restoration pass (Rt1).  On the second one, it was what I call "incomplete" retracing, that leaves bits of original (Rt0) traces extending beyond the end of the Rt1 ones.   But the glyph shapes did not change. The left corners remained slightly rounded and sharp, respectively.

On the second row, with four qo: all four glyphs were retraced by Rt1.  On images 1 and 2 one can see some Rt0 trace in the lower half of the descender.  On the other two, that part was cropped out, so I can't tell whether there was Rt0 there.  But the sharp (not faded) strokes in the same light yellowish brown ink tell me that most of the tracing is Rt1.

In the first three qo of that second row, I cannot tell what the original head looked like, bit it  seems that the Rt1 retracer at first drew a q with small head, and then  corrected himself by drawing a bigger head. 

Aesthetics would be reason enough for why he decided to fix those small q heads. Do you think that he did so because small-head-q and big-head-q are different symbols?  If that was the case, there should be a good number of small-head qs throughout the manuscript.  Are there?

The last qo of that row was not corrected by Rt1. Instead, the second retracer (Rt2) retouched with its characteristic brown-black ink the bottom half of the tail of an y on the line above, which touched the top of the q.  He also re-retraced part of the stem of the q, without changing its shape.  

Or maybe there was an excess of brown-black ink which spread on its own following the Rt1 brown ink -- a "wicking" phenomenon that occurred in many places, wherever ink or liquid paints came into contact with older ink traces.

As for the bottom row of gallows images, the first two seem to be normal handwriting variants of the ideal k shape.  The third image shows what appears to be a splotch or black Rt2 ink over an Rt1 k gallows.  But it does not "fix" the shape of the Rt1 gallows, it only makes it impossible to tell what it was --- whether like the first image, or like the second one.


And the last image seems to be just a fancy version of a k gallows, that occurs a few times in the manuscript in contexts where one would expect the k/t gallows to be fancified into p/f gallows.

All the best, --stolfi