Comment by privong

Comment by privong 4 days ago

> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!

michaelt 4 days ago

> many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof.

I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.

Reply View 1 reply

privong 4 days ago

It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.
I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.
The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.

Reply View | 0 replies

randcraw 4 days ago

Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.

Reply View 0 replies

kqr 4 days ago

Indeed, pencil is one of the best writing implements for archival purposes. As long as one doens't deliberately try to get the graphite off, it'll probably stay on.

Reply View 0 replies