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Learn/Shape Generator/What is a .jshape?

Where it appears

At a glance

  • One dialog surfaces the same catalog in Drafting sketch, Design, Laser, and Plasma
  • Refresh rebuilds the list after you add or edit files—no separate installers per shape

The Shape Generator is one shared tool, not a per-workspace feature. The same dialog, the same catalog, and the same saved settings appear wherever you can use 2D geometry: as a sub-tool inside the Drafting Sketch environment, and from the toolbar in Design, Plasma, Laser, and Router.

One catalog, different destinations

Every workspace lists the same shapes — the bundled set plus everything in your user shapes folder. What changes is where Generate puts the result: in Drafting it imports into the sketch you're editing; in Design it comes in as workspace shapes; in Plasma, Laser, and Router it lands as parts ready to nest on the sheet. In every case the geometry travels through that workspace's normal DXF import path with unit metadata attached, so a millimeter-authored shape arrives at correct real-world size no matter which workspace — or preferred unit setting — you generate it from.

The dialog remembers

Selection and layout persist across workspaces and restarts: the last shape you used, the values you typed into each shape's parameters, preview height, browser width, and which categories you collapsed. Set up a fire pit in Plasma today and the same numbers greet you in Laser tomorrow.

No installers, ever

Adding a shape is adding a file. Drop a .jshape into the shapes folder (or use the dialog's Import button) and hit Refresh — the list rebuilds by re-running each file's setup(), and the new shape is available in all five workspaces at once. See the editing workflow for the full authoring loop.