r/todayilearned • u/ComfortableGreySloth • 15h ago
TIL about heraldic hatching, a historical method of representing color without color.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatching_(heraldry)400
u/Bongo1020 14h ago
To some extent it was still in use when I was in school and your math teacher would bust out the 4Ć Photocopied worksheet from a book last published in 1985
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u/rychan 13h ago
Yeah, that's what I thought this was describing at first, as well. Wikipedia has an article on "Ordered dithering": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordered_dithering
But heraldry hatching is different: Greens always become diagonal lines (with purples as the other diagonal orientation), golds always become dots, blacks always become crossed lines (usually axis aligned), etc. That's not what naturally emerges from grayscale conversion and dithering.
But the concepts are certainly related.
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u/DisconnectedShark 14h ago
Hatching (sometimes called hachure, from the French word) is a conventional system for monochrome denotation of heraldic armory, whereby the tinctures (colours) are represented by dots and lines. This technique is employed in cases where colours, for either aesthetic, practical or economic reasons are not reproduced ā e.g. on surfaces such as woodcuts or engravings, seals and coins.
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u/TheLameSauce 13h ago
I particularly like how if you look at the timeline of standards of this practice changing, someone just decided "no, the way we've represented white for over a century is wrong! Now white is actually brown, and the dots that have been yellow this whole time - that's now white! And yellow gets to be this new thing I'm trying out, horizontal dashes!"
Like, come on Bonnani, was that necessary?
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u/Narpity 13h ago
Iām a cartographer and we use this all the time to represent areas from one another
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u/blueavole 7h ago
Also graphs and charts used to use this when color printing was expensive .
I wish people would still use this because itās easier to understand than five shades of blue.
I donāt care if itās aesthetically pleasing Janet, i have no idea what your point is.
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u/here_pretty_kitty 12h ago
Umā¦does this explain why these were the standard options for special āshadingā going back to like Word 95?
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u/outfoxingthefoxes 14h ago
That looks red
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u/MegaFire03 14h ago
Yes that's the coloured version. In the hatched version they use lines instead of the colour red.
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u/Kuul-aidTheRefresher 13h ago
I remember back in the early 90s my older sister was loaned a desktop computer by her college. It had Risk installed on it but it was only black and white so they used a variety of vertical, horizontal, and angular lines to denote each faction.Ā
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u/DrunksInSpace 14h ago
>That looks red
Right?! Crazy how our brains can decode the hat hing automatically.
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u/ComfortableGreySloth 14h ago
I guess wiki should have made a better embed.
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u/Ash_Crow 14h ago
It uses the first picture. I updated the article to change the order of the images but I doubt Reddit will refresh the preview.
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u/Mind_on_Idle 14h ago
Yeah, but you helped everyone who showed up later. I just clicked for the first time and your edit is up, so should be good!
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u/meatblast_surprise 11h ago
Real talk this is extremely uninteresting and you see it all over old books and diagrams
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u/DasGanon 14h ago
Also led to a very funny situation recently:
Unicode uses Heraldic Hatching as colors in their standards when working with Emoji.
Google didn't understand that, and interpreted those as literal.
And thus, š became a hairy pink heart for Android 4.4.