A system and method for shape recognition of hand-drawn objects is provided. A shape recognizer may recognize a drawing such as a diagram or chart from ink input by recognizing closed containers and/or unclosed connectors in the drawing. The closed containers may represent any number of shapes that may be recognized including circles, ellipses, triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons, and so forth. The unclosed connectors may be any type of connector including lines, curves, arrows, and so forth. Polylines may be used to approximate a skeleton of a connector for handling continuation strokes, overlapping strokes and over-tracing strokes of the skeleton. By using the present invention, a user may draw diagrams and flow charts freely and without restrictions on the hand-drawn input.