These pages describe how to use the website and lists all the heraldic features that DrawShield supports. For those new to the subject there is a brief tutorial on the language of Blazonry, but DrawShield uses typical English Blazonry terms so any book or source on Heraldry would also be relevant. Different sources sometimes use heraldic terms in slightly differing ways so there is a glossary to explain exactly how certain words are used in DrawShield.
In the following pages every word that DrawShield can recognise is shown in a bold font. The program can also recognise variant spellings and alternative terms (e.g. fess and fesse but I have not listed all of these. Short examples of the language of blazonry are given in italic words, while complete blazons are shown as block quotations, also in italics.
Some of the pages end with a section called "Notes". These are observations, suggestions and warnings that the author has come across while developing DrawShield and are placed here in the hope that they may be useful and/or interesting!
I have added somewhat to the notion of "standard" British Heraldic practice. This has been to either to add a class of features that are not normally present (sports, retro sci-fi etc.), or to provide finer control over the shield appearance (charge adjustment and option settings). Since they are additional to ordinary notions of the blazon language I have put them into a separate section titled Extensions. If these offend your sensibilities then you are free to ignore them, but for complete mastery of shield image creation they will almost certainly come in useful!