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Where To Put Charges
Charges a placed on a shield according to a hierarchy of instructions - location, arrangement, orientation, adjustments. This article describes how these work together to display the charge as per the instructions.
This discussion pre-supposes that we have a charge represented as a syntactically correct subset of SVG. All colours, features and modifiers have been applied. This includes 'crowned', 'demi', 'half-of', 'en-soleil' and so on. We also know the size of the charge (width and height) and that it is drawn with coordinate (0,0) at top left and (width,height) at bottom right.
A set of charges (i.e. one or more) are placed in a particular location. A location is a rectangular area on the field of the shield, as shown in the diagram below. The default "location" is the entire shield. Also associated with a location is a default arrangement, which will be used if none is specified in the blazon.
In operation, the charges are arranged in the layout specified by the arrangement, within the bounding box specified by the location. In some circumstances, the actual arrangement might be different depending on the aspect ratio of the bounding box (i.e. whether it is tall, wide or square).
An arrangement is a set of positions, sizes and orientations for a particular number of charges, hence, strictly speaking there is a different arrangement specification for each number of charges, although for ease of implementation sometimes these are combined, and specifications for higher numbers are just ignored.
There are two types of arrangements, calculated and absolute.
Calculated arrangements, as they suggest, are calculated “on-the-fly” depending on the area available, the number of charges and a desired layout of the charges. Layouts might be “evenly spaced along a horizontal line”, or “evenly spaced in rows in a triangular shape” and so on. Charges are sized to fit into the layout neatly.
Absolute arrangements are exact locations within the bounding box, given as percentages of the height and width (as is the size of the charge).
In both cases, a “Charge Bounding Box” is produced, into which the charges are fitted. By default they are scaled as large as possible to fit into the charge bounding box without distortion, but some charges are allowed to “flex”, or stretch so that they fill more of the bounding box. Lions are a good example as they look equally good even when stretched up to 50% in either direction.
There are a few modifiers that can affect arrangements.
Firstly, in calculated arrangements the number of charges in each row can be given in the blazon, e.g. 7 roundels arranged 3,1,3.
Secondly there are modifiers that can affect size and spacing. If there is a single charge then the modifier entire will cause the charge to stretch to fill the whole of the location bounding box