Counting symbols in ZeroCount
Most of an electrical or mechanical takeoff is counting: sockets, luminaires, detectors, valves, sprinkler heads. ZeroCount gives you four ways to do it, and you will usually mix them on one drawing. Every automatic method ends the same way: a Detection group in the sidebar with one marker on every copy of the symbol it found.
Key features
- Auto Count Symbol — the everyday tool. Draw a box around one example of a symbol and ZeroCount finds every other copy on the drawing. Also called Detect New Symbol when you run it from a group's menu. See Detect New Symbol.
- Auto Detect Symbols (scan drawing) — scans a vector drawing once, shows every repeated symbol as a thumbnail with a rough count, and counts all the ones you tick in one go. If you have drawn a legend rectangle it reads the legend instead. See Auto Detect Symbols.
- Count Symbol — click to place a dot on each item yourself. For hand-marked scans, items that never look the same twice, or a handful of things that are quicker to click than to detect. See Counting manually.
- Legend-based auto-detection — the older Stage 1 flow: draw AoIs and a legend, press Submit, and the server extracts every legend symbol and matches it across the drawing. New drawings skip this stage, so you will rarely see it. See Legend-based auto-detection.
Vector and image drawings
Which engine does the work depends on the drawing. A vector PDF (exported straight from CAD) still contains the geometry of every symbol, so ZeroCount reads it directly: results are exact, arrive almost instantly, include rotated and mirrored copies, and preview live while you draw the box. A scanned or flattened image drawing has only pixels, so the standard image detector runs on the server and takes a few seconds. Each drawing carries a vector or image badge, and a button in the workspace header lets you switch a vector drawing to the image detector for that drawing only. See Vector and image drawings.
What a Detection group is
A Detection group is the sidebar row that holds one symbol's results. The row shows the symbol's template thumbnail, its name (Group 1, Group 2 and so on until you rename it), the marker count, and a menu. Expand it and every detection appears as a small cropped thumbnail with its match score. Detections can be dragged between groups, deleted one at a time, or added to by running Detect New Symbol again from the group's menu. Groups merged from several captures show a +N badge on the thumbnail for the extra templates they carry.
Next steps
Start with Detect New Symbol, which covers the box, the live preview and how labels affect matching. On a vector drawing, try Auto Detect Symbols to count a whole sheet at once, and draw a legend rectangle first if the drawing has a symbol key. When results are patchy, Cleaning up the drawing and Detection tips explain what to change.