Re: VMs: Drawing circles

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nick Pelling wrote:

> Many of the circles appear to be slightly wobbly and/or
> non-circular - look at f67r1, for example.
>
> Given the general production techniques for manuscripts, I'm not really
> sure I understand how circular bands of text would be produced easily,
> unless the whole manuscript was rotating....
>
> All in all, there are plenty of circular diagrams in the VMS - so we should
> really be able to work out reasonably definitively from all their
> peculiarities how they were produced.

I think Nick has raised a couple of  interesting ideas here.

1.    Before getting too deep into the question of how the circles were drawn,
it might make sense to take some measurements to determine how circular they
really are. This could be done by measuring the width (that is, the distance
between parallel lines tangent to the circle) in various directions. Also,
where there appears to be a central point marked, the distance from this point
to the circumference could be measured in various directions.

2.    One way to produce circular bands of text would be with a lettering
guide, say a thin circular wooden disk which would be used as the base for the
characters in the band. If this were the case, it seems likely that there would
tend to be several bands with the same radius (assuming a limited set of
guides) rather than all the bands being of different radii. (Incidentally, a
similar guide could be used for drawing the circles, so finding several circles
of the same radius would suggest this.)

Bruce Grant

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