(04-08-2026, 01:13 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The dark ink in that r is clearly a single stroke from top to bottom. Your explanation would have the Scribe tying to draw the plume as a second stroke after that, but the magic quill and magic ink suddenly switched to "faint" after 0.1 mm, and then hiccuped between "faint" and "medium" for the rest of the plume. And the Scribe was OK with that...
Scribe was OK with that because the magic ink is magic: it looks perfectly uniform when applied but then with time (decades or more) some parts of it stay dark and some parts of it become faint or nearly invisible. The secret of the magic ink has been lost, but the effect probably can be reproduced with a poorly mixed iron gall ink and some other unstable colorant. In the fresh ink the colorant will prevail and the writing will look uniform in darkness, but with time the colorant will fade and only the blobs of the proper iron gall ink will remain dark.
Anyway, for me it looks likely that no amount of microscopy can disprove the retracing hypothesis. It will just shift the discussion to the properties of different macro lenses and how they don't capture the right phlogistons or something. I'm not a physicist.
EDIT: also I'm not sure I ever claimed there was smooth transition between the traces. I claimed that they are too well aligned to it to be retracing. The only place where I talk about smooth transition, I'm talking about working with wet ink, and I immediately say there that the transition can be abrupt as well: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.