The Live Legend

What the Live Legend is

The Live Legend is a key drawn onto the drawing itself. It lists every marker group you have created — the colour or symbol, the label, and the count, length or area — and it redraws itself as you work. Count another twenty sockets and the number in the legend follows.

It is what turns an exported PNG or PDF into something a colleague can read without you standing next to them. A marked-up drawing with no key is a drawing covered in coloured boxes; the same drawing with a Live Legend is a takeoff.

Technically it is a special kind of annotation, so it never affects a count, never appears in the Excel quantities export, and can be moved, hidden or deleted like any other annotation.

Getting one onto a drawing

By default, ZeroCount places one for you. The Live Legend preference — User Preferences from the user menu, then Canvas, under On-canvas Items — reads "Automatically place a Live Legend in the top-left of each file the first time you open it. Has no effect on files you've already opened." It is on unless somebody has turned it off.

To add one by hand, or to a drawing you had already opened before turning the preference on:

1. 1

   Choose Actions in the workspace header.

2. 2

   Choose Live Legend .

There is one Live Legend per drawing. If the drawing already has one, the menu item is greyed out and reads (already added) after it.

Finding it in the sidebar

The Live Legend appears in the sidebar as an annotation group. Its single row is marked with and carries two controls of its own:

The row has no duplicate or set-image control, because neither makes sense for a legend. Deleting it, hiding it and renaming its group all work as they do for any annotation group.

The three views

Click the view button to move between them in a loop: flat, then zones, then services, then back to flat.

• Flat is one row per group, in sidebar order. Use it on a straightforward drawing where the group names carry all the information anyone needs.
• Zones breaks the same list down by zone, so each area of the drawing shows its own counts. Use it when the drawing covers several rooms, floors or blocks and the split matters to whoever reads it. See Counting by zone.
• Services groups the rows under your Marker Services headings, with a subtotal for each. Use it when one drawing carries several services and you want them read separately. See Marker Services.

The zones and services views only tell you something new once you have zones or services on the drawing. On a drawing with neither, all three views look much the same.

Refreshing it

The legend keeps itself current, redrawing shortly after you change anything it lists. Refresh now forces it immediately, which is worth doing before an export if you have just made a run of changes and want to be certain the picture matches the numbers.

Moving and resizing

Drag the legend to move it anywhere on the drawing. Dragging its grips changes its width only — the height follows from how many rows it has to fit, so a legend can never be squashed into an unreadable shape. It redraws sharply at the new width when you release.

Set the width so that the longest group name fits on one line, then leave it. If it feels cramped, the answer is usually a shorter group name rather than a wider legend.

In exports

A Live Legend that is visible on screen is exported at full opacity in PNG and PDF exports of the drawing you have open, so it always reads clearly even if you have annotations set faint elsewhere. Hide it, like any group, if you want a clean sheet without it.

It is not drawn on the other drawings in an All Files export, and it never appears in the Excel quantities export.

Next steps

• Annotation markers — the other annotation types.
• Marker Services — the headings the services view uses.
• Counting by zone — the breakdown the zones view uses.
• Exporting drawing images — getting the legend and the drawing out together.