I have been trying to trying to call a template from another document. however, all of my attempts have fails. I have tried all variations of:
<xsl:call-template name="document('shapes.xml')/t4">
    <xsl:with-param name="bar" select="$bar"/>
</xsl:call-template>

Obviously, shapes.xml is the document that i am trying to access, and 't4' is the template that i am trying to use. If anyone has any hints pleas let me know! Thanks in advance to anyone that can help!

You are making pretty wild guesses, which is not a good way to learn a language. Find a book or tutorial that suits your style, and follow it.

You want

<xsl:include href="shapes.xml">

then

<xsl:call-template name="t4"/>

I'm assuming here that shapes.xml is a stylesheet.

Michael Kay
http://www.saxonica.com/
Author, XSLT Programmer's Reference and XPath 2.0 Programmer's Reference