Shapes help

[nick-chura]

This surely conflicts with some of what you did in a previous commit. [I had started working on this already and wasn't able to check which functions you had made changes to.] This attempts to reduce the new errors for working problems and problems that are in development.

[drlippman]

Manually merged in 90762e4d928b643b230c56063d20cfea40407a0e