Try if for yourself at http://www.karlwilcox.com/drawshield. Full release notes are available here.

This RSS feed only contains release notifications, for more in depth discussion please check out the to a Google+ page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110593577831754313389/,

Try if for yourself at http://www.karlwilcox.com/drawshield. Full release notes are available here.

I am moving most of my Drawshield discussion to a Google+ page at https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/110593577831754313389/, please join me there! This RSS feed will continue, but only with new release notifications.

I will probably concentrate on bug fixing rather than new features for a while and then change the release number to 2.4. This is partly because I will soon run out of letters in 2.3 but also because the cumulative effect of the last six or so releases has effectively been a complete rewrite of a third or more of the existing code base. I think a new point release will be in order soon.

Try if for yourself at http://www.karlwilcox.com/drawshield. Full release notes are available here.

Try if for yourself at http://www.karlwilcox.com/drawshield. Full release notes are available here.

Try if for yourself at http://www.karlwilcox.com/drawshield. Full release notes are available here.

The background (i.e. the area outside the shield itself) is now transparent, rather than white. This fits in nicely with coloured pages.

All code that tried to do workarounds for browser SVG rendering bugs has been removed. There are still known issues with rendering objects filled with a division or counterchanged in Chrome – these situations are detected and a warning issued. I don’t currently know of any rendering issues in Firefox or IE9.

Bug Fixes

Some minor tweaks to positioning. Some things that previously worked but I had broken now work again!

Internal Changes

Quite a lot…

I’ve re-written the code that parses features and tinctures for greater speed and flexibility. The various modifiers, features and tinctures that apply to charges and ordinaries can now be in any, arbitrary order (as long as it still makes grammatical sense).

I have removed a lot of redundant and/or messy code and am continuing with a complete code review

I have rewritten the web pages to just inject the SVG inline with the HTML as all modern browsers are quite happy supporting this, and older browsers didn’t support SVG anyway.

I am using XMLHttpRequest.js as a wrapper for cross browser Ajax compatibility

Finally, the code base hosted on Google Code had somehow become seriously out of line with the released version. It is now all back in order.

Future Plans

• Continue the code review
• Continue populating the new drawshield site
• Start tackling some of the issues from the google code issues list

Share and enjoy!

Karl

• In some cases a missing tincture was causing the program to crash instead of providing an error message
• A function name was mis-spelled, also causing a crash in certain circumstances

I am now logging all shield drawing requests to see what features and charges it would be most beneficial to provide.

As per issue 211 there are new and improved error and information messages available "behind" the shield, press click for information.

The divisions tierced in bend, tierced in bend sinister and tierced in chevron have been added, all require three tinctures.

I have been raiding wikimedia commons again. The following charges have been added. The words in braces are features that may be given a different tincture from the body, the asterisks indicate charges for which there is a proper tincture.

• Crane (issue 188)
• Peacock (in his pride) {they eyes of the tail} *
• Vine {leaved, fructed, the vine stick} *
• Vine Leaf *
• Ship {sails, pennants} * (lots of ship descriptions, like sails furled are also recognised, but all are ignored, there is only 1 ship!)
• Cow {horned, collared}
• Barrel (Tun) {hooped}
• Salamander {crowned, enflamed}
• wolf head {eyes}
• quatrefoil
• Apple Tree {leaved, fructed} *
• Phoenix {enflamed, beaked, langued} *

In addition the tower may now itself be triple towered

Bug Fixes

Nothing of significance.

Internal Changes

Nothing of significance.

Added field division per chevron inverted. The division parsing code has been generally tidied up and the various options and modifiers can now appear in any order.

Added charge question mark. Not actually a heraldic charge but used to mark missing tinctures. May however be useful if developing arms for Batman’s arch-rival, The Riddler.

You can now say on chargeA chargeB, which means the same thing as chargeA charged with chargeB.

Bug Fixes

The pall inverted was not in the correct place, it is now. Further variant spellings have been added.

The not-understood words had disappeared from error messages. They are back.

Internal Changes

BlazonML has been modified to give tinctures an "index" attribute, instead of relying on its position within the parse tree. Tincture and modifier elements can now be freely mixed in any order.