Spacing

OK, so I've been practising the "dipped" tops, and the straight lines and diamonds, with writing that latin sentence that is all m's and n's, u's and i's as part of that practise (I'll do the pen flourish-y practise later)
It occured to me today that my Latin sentence was too legible. You could distinguish the individual letters, whereas the whole point of this sentence is that they should only be distinguishable by the joins internal to the m, n and u's.

So I had a look at the spacing. I measured point to point of the diamonds in Drogin's example of the B.H. I measured point to point on another page of the B.H.
And they are all equally distanced, regardless of which part of which letter they are.
The page I measured from varied a little, but it was pretty consistent. (4 or 5 mm, regardless of letter height)

I measured mine, and they were all over the place. I'm putting in extra space between each of the letters.

So now I'm about to print out some new graph paper with 5 mm wide columns, (one for each vertical) and a second lot of lines spaced at 1mm, so I can size the diamonds for each vertical correctly.
The diamonds will be very nearly touching. (they should be 4 mm wide) unless it is a 'n' or 'm' where they have the joins at the top.
They would touch if the flicks are added to the diamonds (this is the final step in creating the diamonds, and one I'm not going near at the moment. Flicks are easy)

I'm suppressing a quiet urge to scream. I shall get this right. One day. At least I've got pretty good at doing the built up diamonds, and the dipped tops, though I haven't done dipped bottoms yet.

I was looking at the Second Coming last night. I always thought the writing was below my best standard, and actually pretty crap. With this recent knowledge/practise, it appears even crapper. But that means that I'm progressing :-)

As I looked I was wondering why to the Lord God why I did a two columnar format for the piece, as it destroys the rhythm of the poem, and makes it hard to read. As Paul pointed out, it should be at least 5 words to the column to start with.
I was imitating the layout of the 42 line Gutenberg Bible - that's why I did it.
But from Paul's comment about modifying design to suit the piece (in terms of the length of the bottom margin) - I wouldn't do it like that again. I don't feel that I have to follow what the source mss did - but use it as inspiration, and use the medieval 'rules' plus modern design rules in my design work.

I've put some information (like Fraktur being a German version of the German script) which is kind of really obvious. And about the spacing today. It's really obvious information. But I'm finding that there is a big difference between reading about something, and *realising* it. Once it's realized, you don't forget it. It kind of goes internal.

Graph paper printing time ......and only very quiet screams.