What Stage 2 is for
Stage 2 is the correction stage. ZeroCount has made its best guess at every symbol on the drawing — now you go through and tidy up.
"Review and amend the detected legend symbols. Create new markers to highlight any missed components. Create a new group to manually mark any missed legend symbols. Or, rearrange existing markers assigned to the wrong group."
You'll spend most of your time in Stage 2. It's where the interesting work happens — the kind of judgement calls a machine can't make alone.
What you'll see
The canvas shows the drawing with every detected marker visible as a coloured overlay. The sidebar on the right is a tree of marker groups:
- Auto Count Symbol — Detection groups created by Stage 1's auto-detection or by the Auto Count Symbol tool.
- Count Symbol — Unit groups you've manually placed.
- Linear Measurement — Linear length groups.
- Area Measurement — Area polygon groups.
- Annotations — Free-form annotation markers (Stage 3 mostly, but visible here).
Each section header shows a count of markers. Each group inside shows its label, marker count, colour, and an expand toggle.
For the full sidebar tour: Marker groups.
The most common Stage 2 operations
1. Delete false positives
ZeroCount sometimes detects symbols on text labels, scale bars, or background noise.
- 1
Click the marker on the canvas to select it.
- 2
Press DEL.
To delete many at once, hold CTRL and drag a marquee around them, then press DEL.
2. Add a symbol that detection missed
If ZeroCount missed a few instances of a symbol that's already in a group, use Auto Count Symbol to find more.
- 1
Click Auto Count Symbol in the toolbar.
- 2
Drag a box around an example of the missed symbol on the drawing.
- 3
ZeroCount searches the rest of the drawing for matches and adds them to a new group, or to an existing one if it recognises the symbol.
3. Move markers between groups
When ZeroCount splits one symbol across two groups (or mixes two symbols into one), reassign by drag:
- 1
Click and hold the marker on the canvas.
- 2
Drag it onto the target group in the sidebar.
- 3
Release. The marker re-parents to the new group instantly.
See Dragging markers between groups.
4. Merge two groups
If two groups represent the same symbol (sometimes the legend has a slightly different rendering of the same fitting):
- 1
Click the merge icon on the source group's row.
- 2
Pick the target group from the list.
- 3
The two groups become one.
See Merging groups.
5. Add a manual marker
If a single missed symbol doesn't justify a full Auto Count, place a marker manually.
- 1
Click Auto Count in the toolbar (or the + on a specific group's row).
- 2
Click on the drawing where the symbol sits.
The new marker joins the active group.
Working with the toolbar
The toolbar at the top of the editor exposes the marker creation tools, scale settings, and an Actions menu. Most marker-creation buttons live in two dropdowns:
- Takeoff — manual creation of Detection, Unit, Linear, and Area markers.
- Linked Takeoff — same, but with the database link picker opening at the same time so the new group is priced from the start.
Confirm and pricing-related work is usually left for Stage 3.
When you're done with Stage 2
Click the Stage 3 pill in the stage indicator at the top of the editor to advance. You can always come back to Stage 2 by clicking the Stage 2 pill again.
You don't need everything perfect to move on. Many people do a rough Stage 2 pass, advance to Stage 3 for naming and linking, then return to Stage 2 if something needs fixing.