Files & templates

Three boards to start from, each real geometry rather than an approximation — inherited from BoardCAD, which Wooden Surfboard Designer descends from.

Shortboard

A performance shortboard — the default board the editor opens with.

Funboard

A mid-length, between a shortboard and a longboard.

Longboard

A traditional longboard outline and rocker.

.board.json

Wooden Surfboard Designer's own format. Plain JSON, so it stays readable and diffable, and it round-trips everything the app knows about a board.

.brd

The legacy BoardCAD format. Written for compatibility with the older tool, though some Wooden Surfboard Designer-specific detail has nowhere to live in it.

Saving downloads a file through the browser. Recently opened boards are listed so you can get back to them without hunting through a downloads folder.

Share — in the top bar, or File → Share… — turns the board on screen into a link. The whole board travels inside the link, so there is no upload, no account and nothing stored on a server. Anyone who opens it gets an editable copy in their own browser.

It is a snapshot, not a shared document. Editing your board afterwards does not change what the link opens, and a link cannot be updated or revoked once you have sent it. If you need someone to see a later version, send a new link.

What travels

The outline, rocker and every cross-section; the interpolation type and the fin setup; and the full Board Info — designer, model, surfer, comments, fin and foam type, glass schedule. Anyone with the link can read all of it, so treat the designer and surfer fields as public.

What does not

Trace images and any other image data, the comparison ghost board, undo history, your recent boards, and your own settings — units, camera, overlays and appearance. Opening a shared board also hides your own trace images so they do not sit under someone else's outline; they are hidden, not deleted, and the Trace image section turns them back on. That section opens by itself in the outline and rocker views, and carries a dot on its header whenever an image is loaded.

A normal board makes a link of roughly three kilobytes. Past 30,000 characters the app warns that some forums may truncate or reject it, and past 50,000 it will not make one at all — send the .board file instead. A URL shortener such as TinyURL may help with a long link, but be aware it receives the complete board link, and may not accept or preserve it; Wooden Surfboard Designer never submits your link anywhere by itself.

Share links need a current browser (they use the built-in Compression Streams APIs). In an older one the app says so and offers the .board file instead. Link previews show the generic Wooden Surfboard Designer card — a preview image of the board itself is not something a link-only design can produce.

The editor reads Shape3d files (.s3dx and the older .s3d) and BoardCAD .brd files, including the weakly-encrypted variant. The intent is that a design you already own is not stranded in software you have stopped using.

Real-world files vary, so imported geometry is repaired where it is safe to do so — for example reconciling a deck curve stored as thickness rather than an absolute height, which would otherwise produce a visible bulge in the rocker.

When a file contains something that cannot be represented exactly, you are told rather than left to notice later. Two levels: a notice when the file was repaired non-destructively, and a confirmation you have to accept when detail will actually be dropped.

On your device. The board you are working on is saved continuously to browser storage, so closing the tab and returning restores it — along with your view, camera position, trace images and settings. A phone is the one exception to the view: it does not offer the quad view, so it opens on the outline instead and leaves your stored preference alone.

Boards are saved in your browser, not to an account. That also means clearing your browser's site data clears your working board, so export anything you want to keep.

You can load a photo or scan behind the outline or rocker view and shape to it. Calibrate by clicking four known points and entering a real dimension, then move, rotate and flip the image to line it up. Trace images are stored per view on your device and are not part of the board file.