Good news for perfectionists with Kindle Scribe

Kindle Scribe users are finally getting Smart Shapes, a long-awaited feature that turns rough sketches into clean diagrams. The tool automatically refines hand-drawn shapes into cleaner, more accurate versions.

Smart Shapes arrived as part of the most recent software update, but you wouldn’t know it from the release notes. The relatively vague notes focus mostly on PDF improvements. As usual, the change has been noticed by users rather than explicitly mentioned by Amazon.

Amazon’s Smart Shapes cover the basics, including squares, circles, triangles, lines, and arrows. It’s more than enough for organizing notes or cleaning up sketches. To use the tool, you simply draw the desired shape to the best of your ability and keep moving your stylus for additional beats until the shape snaps into place. As soon as a shape is locked, a menu appears with options to resize, rotate, copy, cut, or delete it. You can also adjust the line thickness or fill shape using the color palette available on supported models.

Shape recognition has been standard on competing e-ink tablets for years, and without it, the Scribe felt a little unsophisticated, at least for those of us who can’t draw a perfect circle by hand. This update is in line with what users have come to expect from this category of devices.

For availability, the update is being released gradually. Some Reddit users already have it, while others are still waiting. To see if your Kindle still supports Smart Shapes, make sure you’re using the latest software version 5.19.3.0.1. Then, open a new notebook and the tutorial images above will appear if Smart Shapes are available.