Shape Libraries: A Complete Guide

Two Kinds of Library, One Question

Every diagram in CorriDraw is the same two things: shapes and arrows between them. The hard part is almost never the arrows. It is finding the right shape fast enough that you stay in the thought you were trying to capture. If you have to stop and draw a crow's-foot by hand, or guess at the right geometry for a UML interface lollipop, you have lost the thread.

CorriDraw solves that in two different ways, and it helps to keep them straight from the start:

• Shape packs are the built-in, curated collections that sit in the toolbar. They come with the editor, and you turn them on and off from the Shape Packs dialog in the main menu.
• The library sidebar is your personal toolbox. Anything you select on the canvas can be saved there, re-used later, shared with a teammate as a single file, or published to the community library site.

The rest of this guide walks through both — what ships in the box, how to add your own, and how to share them.

The Four Built-In Shape Packs

CorriDraw ships with four shape packs: Flowchart, UML, Database, and Geometry. All four are enabled by default, so when you open a fresh canvas every tool on this page is one click away in the toolbar.

Flowchart

The flowchart pack is the one most people reach for first. It follows the same set of symbols you see in textbooks and procurement documents, so if someone has drawn a flowchart before, the shapes will already feel familiar:

• Start / End — rounded stadium shape for the entry and exit of a flow.
• Process — plain rectangle for a single step of work.
• Decision — diamond for a yes/no or multi-branch question.
• Input / Output — parallelogram for data entering or leaving the process.
• Document — rectangle with a wavy bottom edge.
• Subroutine — process box with vertical bars down each side, for a call into another process.
• Preparation — hexagon used for set-up steps.
• Manual Input — trapezoid with the top tilted, for a human-entered value.
• Merge — downward triangle for joining two flows.
• Connector — small circle that lets you link two parts of the same flow without crossing lines on the page.
• Off Page — home-plate pentagon that says "continued on the next page".
• Display — curved screen shape for anything shown to a user.
• Data Storage — open cylinder for durable storage.

Thirteen shapes is enough to draw any textbook flowchart without reaching for plain rectangles. For the story of how these shapes are actually used in practice, see the Flowchart 101 guide.

UML

The UML pack covers the shapes that actually come up when you draw a UML diagram by hand. It is focused on the primitives rather than diagram-specific compositions, because almost every UML diagram is a re-arrangement of the same eighteen shapes:

• Structure — Class, Interface, Note, Package, Component, Node, Artifact.
• Use cases — Actor (stick figure) and Use case (ellipse).
• State machines — Initial state, Final state, History state, Deep history state, Choice pseudo-state.
• Ports and assembly — Provided interface (lollipop) and Required interface (socket).
• Activity diagrams — Swimlane and Fork / Join bar.

Class and Interface shapes are drawn with compartments — the type name across the top, attributes and methods underneath — so you type straight into the shape rather than arranging three rectangles yourself. The full UML guide walks through the whole set being used in real diagrams.

Database

The Database pack covers the shapes you actually draw when designing a schema — both the Chen-style entity-relationship primitives and a couple of physical-schema icons that belong on the same diagram:

• Entity — rectangle with a header band for the entity name and a body for attributes. Doubles as a table when you are sketching a physical schema.
• Weak entity — double-bordered rectangle, for entities that only exist in relation to another (an Order Line without its parent Order).
• Associative entity — rectangle with a diamond inscribed, for resolving a many-to-many relationship that carries its own attributes.
• Weak relationship — double-bordered diamond, the partner shape for a weak entity.
• Database — the classic vertical cylinder, for when the diagram zooms out to show whole databases and services talking to each other.

The plain Diamond (relationship) and Ellipse (attribute) from the Geometry pack are also surfaced in the Database toolbar, so you can reach the Chen primitives without switching packs.

Cardinality — "one", "many", "zero-or-one", "one-or-many" — is not a separate shape. In CorriDraw, crow's-foot notation is a property of the arrow. Draw the connector, click it, and pick the cardinality at each end from the Arrow properties panel. The shape of the arrowhead changes to match. This means you can switch an existing diagram between Chen and crow's-foot without redrawing a single line. The crow's-foot guide walks through a worked example.

Geometry

The Geometry pack is the one you keep on for everything. It is the set of unstyled primitives that every other diagram type leans on when nothing specialised fits:

• Rectangle, Diamond, Ellipse, Triangle, Parallelogram, Trapezoid
• Pentagon, Hexagon, Octagon
• Semicircle, Star

These are also the shapes with keyboard shortcuts in the toolbar — press R for a rectangle, D for a diamond, O for an ellipse, T for a triangle — which is why they stay quick to reach even if every other pack is turned off.

Turning Packs On and Off

All four packs are on by default. If you only ever draw flowcharts, the UML entries in the toolbar are noise. Open the main menu, pick Shape Packs, and you get a grid of four cards — one per pack — with the pack name, the number of shapes it contains, a preview strip of the first few icons, and a toggle on the right. Click a card to flip it on or off.

Two things worth knowing:

• The choice is remembered in your browser, so the next time you open the editor you see the same toolbar you left.
• You cannot turn every pack off. At least one has to stay on so the toolbar is never empty.

Turning a pack off only hides its tools from the toolbar. Diagrams you have already drawn are untouched — the shapes stay on the canvas, and if you turn the pack back on, the tools come back immediately.

Your Personal Library

The built-in packs are the shapes everyone gets. The library sidebar is the shapes you build up over time. Open it from the sidebar toggle on the right of the canvas, or select a few elements on the canvas, right-click, and choose Add to library.

Anything added to the library is a full, self-contained copy of whatever you had selected — including grouped compound shapes, text, arrows, and any colours or strokes you had applied. Dragging a library item back onto the canvas gives you a fresh copy to edit. Changing that copy does not change the library entry, and vice versa. This is deliberate: it means a late edit to one diagram never quietly mutates every other diagram that re-used the same shape.

Some places this pays off quickly:

• A server-rack graphic with six annotated lines — build it once, save it, re-use on every infrastructure diagram.
• Your team's standard swimlane header with the right font and colour — no need to re-style every time.
• A UML class pre-populated with its usual five methods — drop it in, rename, done.

Sharing a Library

The library is not trapped inside one browser. The menu at the top of the library sidebar has three actions: Load, Export, and Publish library.

Export saves your library — or just the items you have selected — to a single library file on your computer. You can email it, drop it into Slack, attach it to a ticket, or keep it in a shared folder. Anyone who has CorriDraw can open it.

Load goes the other way. Pick a library file and its shapes are added to your sidebar. The important word there is added: loading a teammate's file never erases the shapes you already had. If you load the same file twice you will end up with duplicate copies — when you are distributing an updated pack, put a version in the filename (for example acme-shapes-v3.corridrawlib) and tell people to remove the old entries before loading the new one.

Tip: Keep your team's library file in the same place you keep your other shared documents. One agreed-upon file that someone owns and re-exports after every change is far easier to keep tidy than half-a-dozen partially-synchronised copies.

Browse and Publish

The library sidebar also has a Browse libraries link that opens the community library site in a new tab. That site hosts shape sets contributed by other people — icon packs, cloud-service glyphs, decorative sets, industry-specific collections — and every entry installs back into your sidebar with a single click.

Going the other way, Publish library lets you submit your own shapes. You pick the items you want to share, fill in an author name and a description, and the submission goes up for review. Once it is accepted, anyone else can browse and install it the same way. The items you have published are marked as published in your local library so you can see at a glance which of your shapes are already out in the world.

Publishing is optional. Most teams never need it — sending a library file around internally is usually enough. Publishing is for when you want the shapes to live somewhere permanent and discoverable by people outside your team.

A Quieter Library: Paste Text

There is a fifth way to get shapes onto the canvas that is easy to forget about: paste text.

CorriDraw can read Mermaid and PlantUML diagrams. Open Text to diagram from the main menu, paste in a snippet, and you get a fully-editable CorriDraw diagram — not an image, not an embed. Between them the two formats cover flowcharts, sequence diagrams, class diagrams, ER diagrams, state machines, kanban boards, timelines, mind maps, requirement diagrams, and block diagrams. If you already have diagram source sitting in a project README or a wiki page, paste it; you get a starting canvas that would have taken an hour to draw from scratch.

This is not a substitute for the shape packs. A Mermaid-rendered flowchart uses exactly the same thirteen shapes from the Flowchart pack once it lands on the canvas. It is a way of getting to those shapes faster when the diagram already exists somewhere as text. See Mermaid to CorriDraw for a walk-through.

Working With Teams

Shape libraries are one of those features that compound with use. A few habits that have held up over time:

• Name the purpose, not the look. "Primary action button" beats "blue rounded rectangle". The name is what you will search for six months from now.
• One canonical file per library. Nominate one person or one shared folder as the source of truth, and re-export after every change. Everyone round-tripping their own edits is how libraries drift apart.
• Version the filename. A file called acme-shapes-v4.corridrawlib is instantly legible; an undated library.corridrawlib from eight months ago is not.
• Prune regularly. Libraries grow fast. Every few months, open the sidebar and delete the items you have stopped using — the ones that are left become much easier to find.

None of this is unique to CorriDraw. It is the same discipline you would apply to any shared design asset. But because a CorriDraw library is a single file that you can copy, send, and load anywhere, the usual care pays off without any extra tooling. The more shapes your team builds and organises, the faster every future diagram becomes — and the time you put into a well-kept library pays itself back on every diagram that comes after.