pyBlazon Hacks

This page is for hacks, tricks to mis-/ab-use the pyBlazon program to do things it might not do right otherwise. It'll probably be placed into a Wiki of some sort when this project acquires a more professional home.

• proper: Blazoning something as proper really means not to fill it in with anything. For external raster images, this is often the Right Thing to do, and means what it should in a blazonry context: use the colors you're given. But for ordinary charges, it winds up making them invisible; their fill is set to none. This can be handy for making groups of charges.
• area: There is an unofficial charge called an area (field already was being used in the grammar for something else), which is basically a huge rectangle (about the size of the entire field). Use this with "proper" as described above, and you can do things like or three areas proper each charged with three shakeforks sable to get the shakeforks in little groups. Insert more iterations of areas proper for greater and greater fractal effect. You can also use this for making complex semy fields, though currently the grammar is wrong, so you have to say argent semy of on an area proper eight roundels gules three two and three. This has all been superceded by grammar-changes allowing argent three groups of as many escutcheons azure and or semy of groups of five pellets, but the trick might still be useful.
• 0: The number-word "zero" is not understood, but you can specify the digit 0 as a number. This can be convenient for messing with the sizes and placements of arrangements of charges, as in sable seven plates 0 1 2 0 1 and 3.
• Treatment Abuse: The parser is pretty free about what you can provide as the field treatments composing a party per pale/fess/etc , or barry/paly/bendy, etc. So you can say things like per pale barry or and azure and barry azure and or to get a barry shield that's countercharged per pale. Or you can use the lp and rp special tokens that act like parentheses and say barry of six lp barry of twelve or and azure rp and lp barry of twelve argent and gules rp to get a barry treatment of four colors. You can use this hack to get you things like “per pale and per chevron” or “per cross per fess indented” or other tricks which the grammar does not support.