Klundtasaur's Inkcyclopedia for r/fountainpens

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The goal of the Inkcyclopedia is to be a uniform, non-profit reference for every fountain pen ink ever.

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There are already hundreds of pictures online of almost any ink--but it's sometimes difficult to tell the true hue of the ink because each picture will have it's own lighting, nib size, paper type, camera, angle, etcā€¦ And while some online retailers have extensive libraries of scanned inks, they typically only cover the inks that they sell--leaving it difficult to compare across region-limited brands or exclusive editions.

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My obsessive nature demanded better. I started writing up sample pages of inks that were most popular among Reddit's fountain pen community and scanning them. The goal was originally to allow people to more accurately picture what an ink would look like in person by comparing my scans of an ink they already had to a new ink they were considering. I standardized my methodology, and ordered a shit-ton of samples.

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After I'd done a few hundred scans, a couple of other folks were kind enough to send me a few milliliters of hard-to-find or discontinued inks, and it became important to me to make sure that their generosity wasnā€™t betrayed. All of my scans are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License--feel free to use and share the images, but please reference this post as attribution of the source.

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Eventually, another generous and kind user was willing to help code a bot that could interface with Airtableā€™s API to respond with scans from the Inkcyclopedia when someone called the name of an inkā€”and /u/Ink_Bot was born.

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It is hard for me to imagine that this Airtable will be useful for anyone who doesnā€™t use fountain pens, but the folks at Airtable seemed to think it might be.

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One disclaimer: while my scans are calibrated to reflect what the test page looks like if it is held in direct sunlight, your lighting (CCFL, LED, incandescent, etc) will change the way ink looks in person, and obviously monitor calibration will have a huge impact on how the ink looks on your screen.

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Updated January 13, 2019 at 3:48 PM
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Klundtasaur

Obsessively Cataloguing Ink since 2015
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