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Stroke Colours Discussion
- Shield outlines are NOT stroked (except in outline mode)
- Divisions are NOT stroked (except in outline mode)
- Ordinaries are NOT stroked
- except in outline mode, or
- they are fimbriated (in which case the colour is as given)
- Charges are stroked in a colour defined by the currently chosen palette
- except with the inked effect, which case they are thicker and always black
If no stroke colour is given in the palette that from the drawshield palette is used, currentl #696969 (mid gray)
If the stroke colour is the same (or very similar to) the colour of the charge they will not be visible (e.g. black strokes on a lion sable). The current mid gray was chosen to be at least partly visible against any of the normal heraldic colours.
As far as I am aware there are no heraldic precendents or guidance here, so we must make our own decisions!
Also, I am restricting this discussion to heraldic colours only (so not concerned with, for example, the named web colours).
It has been suggested that this could be improved as some charges look better with, for example black strokes - however some charges, notably simple geometric shapes look too intrusive if this is done globally. Note also the considerations above.
Although apparantely simple this has the following (not insurmountable) issues:
- We would probably need at least two default colours, one to be used with light tinctures, the other for dark. Alternatively we could define a stroke-colour for each of the heraldic colours. UPDATE Alternatively we could apply colour theory to create a "contrasting" or "complementary" colour algorithmically. This would be an update to rgb() in tincture.inc.
- At the moment the stroke is applied globally to all parts of the charge, we would need to change this to cater for features that are in a different colour from the main part of the charge and so would need a different stroke colour
I guess the main criticism of this approach is that the "one size fits all" approach doesn't necessarily work, e.g. simple shapes outlined in black above.
This is fairly easy, it would be an addition to the "drawn using" extension, something like "drawn using strokes sable", and we would probably want to also add this as a dropdown(?) selection to the options panel under colour scheme.
I think that the problem with this one is that it applies the same strokes to everything.
Again, this is fairly easy, it would be a change to the feature syntax, so we would have "a lion or stroked sable"
This does have the problem that features that, for example, are separately coloured sable would not have visible strokes, but in reality this becomes the user's problem to choose a colour that works for the whole charge.
Charges (and charge groups) can have metadata associated with them, for example this is things like their proper colour, which way they "face", how much they can flex etc. We could add a new metadata item, stroke colour. This could be an actual colour or, perhaps more usefully, a "stroke hint" like "use contrasting strokes on me", or "use subdued strokes on me".
This could be combined with 1) above where for each heraldic colour we can define a "contrast" stroke colour a "subdued" stroke colour and a preferred stroke colour. The latter would be used if there is no metadata for the current charge (or we could just default to the contrast colour)
There's no particular reason (other than development time!) that we couldn't do ALL of the above, although it starts to get a bit complicated to explain to the users!
Thoughts and comments welcome.
Doing 3) only is easy, it dumps the problem on the user and makes it go away, but I do agree that we perhaps should do something else as well as those lions do look so much better stroked in black!
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