VMs: RE: Gallows - diverting the eye?

[Jorge Stolfi <stolfi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

    > [Jon Grove] However the point I was trying to make about the
    > gallows was that they often look as though they were written not
    > in a single stroke for each 'leg' as you suggest (and as would
    > seem sensible for speed of writing), but with each leg drawn in
    > two parts with a break about half way down. It's as though they
    > were originally drawn as two (or one) small 'i' strokes and the
    > top halves of the verticals drawn in separately. Sometimes it
    > looks as though the bottom half is more like a 'c' that is then
    > overdrawn by the tall vertical.

Hmmm... 

If you check the hi-res images which I posted recently,
you will see that some platform gallows have a very faint ligature.
Check for instance the first "ckh" in the third line of 

  http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/voynich/BeineckeScanSample-f87v-top.jpg
  
As you can see, where the ligature cuts through the gallows' legs,
there ocurs a bulge of the latter. For one thing, the still-wet leg
makes better contact with the quill than the dry vellum, and hence is
able to pull more ink out of it. And, of course, the motion of the
quill then spreads that ink to the right.

My conjecture is that most instances of gallows with "broken legs" are due to 
near-invisible ligatures like the above.  That may well be the case also of 
most groups like "ete", "eke", etc.. 

All the best,

--stolfi