Find every instance of a symbol with Detect New Symbol and Auto Detect Symbols, draw legends and AoIs, clean up the drawing, and count by hand where needed.
11 articles
Ways to Count Symbols
An overview of the ways ZeroCount counts symbols on a drawing: Auto Count Symbol from one example, Auto Detect Symbols for the whole sheet, Count Symbol by hand, and the older legend-based flow.
Updated 4 September 2026
Detect New Symbol
How to count every copy of a symbol from one example with Auto Count Symbol: drawing the box or polygon, the live preview on vector drawings, what happens after release, and how labels affect what matches.
Auto Detect Symbols (Scan Drawing)
How to scan a whole vector drawing for repeated symbols, read the results grid, expand merged variants, and count several symbols in one pass.
Drawing a Legend
How to draw a legend rectangle round a drawing's symbol key so Auto Detect Symbols reads it one row at a time, and how to rename, show, lock and delete legends.
Areas of Interest (AoIs)
How to draw an AoI to keep detection inside one part of a drawing, and how to lock, hide, rename, recolour and delete AoIs.
Adding to an Existing Group
How to run Detect New Symbol into a group you already have, add counts by hand, redetect from a thumbnail, and refresh a group's thumbnails.
Searching All Drawings in a Category
How ZeroCount repeats a symbol capture or a linear sample across the other drawings in the same category in the background, which drawings it skips, and how to turn it off.
Counting Manually with Count Symbol
How to place counts by hand with Count Symbol, keep the tool armed for a run of items, resize the dots, and start a count that is priced from the outset.
Cleaning Up the Drawing
How to use Remove Background and Ignore Colours to take architectural linework and unwanted services out of the picture so detection has a clearer view.
Legend-Based Auto-Detection (The Legacy Flow)
Background on the original Stage 1 pipeline that read a drawing's legend and matched every symbol across the sheet, and what replaces it today.
Getting Better Detection Results
What to change when a capture misses copies or picks up the wrong ones: how to draw the box, how labels are treated, why a capture falls back to the standard detector, and the messages that explain a short count.
