Bad news: f116v was substantially mangled by Retracer

[oshfdk]

Yes, I know the chemistry of iron-gall ink.  But the reasoning should go the other way: given the amount and kind of fading that we see on the VMS, it cannot be iron-gall ink.

Unless it was already this way in the beginning. I invented some tentative explanation above, here's a completely different one: this is a cipher that actually uses two kinds of ink, darker ink for nulls and fainter ink for strokes that should actually be interpreted as part of the cipher. This would even explain why deciphering attempts fail: the moment you transcribe the text into any form, the crucial information about which parts were ink A and which ink B is lost.

This could also explaine possible irregularities in the McCrone report, if the ink was custom made to accommodate the cipher.

Again, I'm not proposing this as "the solution", I'm just saying there are endless possibilities that would explain the irregular ink density and the absence of double lines in MSI scans, those that otherwise would be expected for retracing.

For me personally it doesn't matter much if the text was retraced or not, as long as the retracing was faithful to the original. For bulk of the text available in MSI scans there are no signs of "bad" retracing, so it's good either way for me. Even if there was a retracer and some mistakes were made, so far it looks like there is not a single clear instance of original character X and a different retraced character Y on any of the MSI scans.