Bordures

Bordures are a complex subject, as there are potentially hundreds of variations given the different shapes of shields, variant edges and quarterings, each of which has their own artistic consideration as well (interior right angles are particularly awkward for many edge variations). Our genius programmer @mattbass has developed code which makes a very good job of fitting bordure variations to the majority of shield shapes. There are however likely to be "edge" (hah!) cases which may need further work, if you come across any of these please let us know.

Also it should be noted that bordures come in two sizes, the normal thick version and a thinner version known as a fillet bordure. There doesn't seem to be a specific heraldic heritage for this however it could exist as an equivalent to the fillet cross and fillet saltire and turns out to be quite useful artistically so we have included it in DrawShield

Notes

Where the name includes "compony1-of16" you should just replace this with compony [tincture] and [tincture] (the other parts are for a future expansion).

The names shown here are firstly, the overall shield shape; followed by the word "chief" if the bordure respects the presence of the chief; followed by the edge variation, if any. If you want force the bordure to cover the chief as well put in last in the blazon, preceeded by the word overall, e.g. ermine a chief gules overall a bordure or.