Punctuation

After careful study of many blazons I have been able to determine that they follow one of two rules for the use of punctuation:

Rule 1: All punctuation can be ignored (except when it can't)

Rule 2: All punctuation is significant (except when it isn't)

More seriously, it appears that it is used so inconsistently between blazons that it is almost useless to treat punctuation characters in any consistent and meaningful way. For this reason, DrawShield ignores all punctuation except in the following situations:

'(' and ')' (round brackets) cause the enclosing words to be completely ignored (but they are displayed in the blazon below the shield)

'-' (hyphen) hyphens within words are treated exactly like spaces (so for example seme-de-lys and seme de lys are exactly equivalent. Any word that starts with a hyphen (or a hyphen on its own) will cause DrawShield to ignore everything after it. This is typically used to give the name of the arms holder, after the blazon itself.

'"' Double quotation marks cause the enclosed items to be treated as a single word. This is useful for mottoes and other words. Note that within the double quotes all other punctuation IS included. To include a double quotation mark within the quotation prefix it with a '\' (backslash)

';' (semi-colon) The idea of the semi-colon is to help distinguish between separate items (and separate shields in a marshalled set of shields), for example 3 mugs inverted; on a chief or a roundel vert should ensure that the roundel goes on the chief, not the mugs.

';;' (double semi-colon) This special character sequence is not really heraldic (or English for that matter) but is necessary to indicate when you have completed a quartering and want to describe something that goes over all the quarterings.

',' (comma) In most cases this is ignored, except in a list of tinctures, in which case it separates them into individual tinctures, where there might otherwise be an ambiguity. For example Per pale azure checky or and vert is drawn as azure checky or on one side and vert on the other. But what if we actually wanted blue on one side and checky on the other? For that we need a comma, so Per pale azure, checky or and vert which gives us the result we are after.

'[' ']' (Square brackets) These also cause the content to be ignored, however I would not recommend their use in a blazon as they are used in error messages to indicate which words DrawShield has itself decided to ignore as it doesn't understand them.