Auto Detect Linear

Taking off several services at once

Auto Takeoff from one sample needs you to find and drag across one run of each service. On a busy services drawing that means hunting for a clean stretch of cold water, then heating, then chilled water, then gas, and repeating the gesture four times.

Auto Detect (pick line patterns) does the hunting for you. It reads the whole drawing, lists every coloured line pattern it can see, and runs a full detection on each pattern you tick. Each ticked pattern produces exactly the same result a manual sample would.

Where the tool is

Open New Takeoff in the header and choose Auto Detect (pick line patterns) under the Auto Takeoff heading.

If the item is greyed out, a line of small text under the Auto Takeoff heading gives the reason:

On an image or scanned drawing the same heading reads Image drawing — first detection takes a few seconds. The tool still works; the first analysis is just slower.

Picking patterns

1. 1

   Choose Auto Detect (pick line patterns) . The Auto-detect patterns window opens and analysis starts.

2. 2

   Wait while the window shows Analysing drawing vectors…. On a large drawing this takes a few seconds.

3. 3

   Read the list. Each row shows a short line swatch in the pattern's own colour, drawn dashed if the pattern is dashed, and the word Solid or Dashed beside it.

4. 4

   Tick the patterns you want. Every row starts unticked.

5. 5

   Click Detect 3 patterns — the button counts what you have ticked and stays disabled until at least one row is ticked.

Press ESC or click outside the window to close it without detecting anything. Cancel does the same.

The "already detected" pill

A row carries a small already detected pill when one of your existing samples used a line of that colour and dashedness. The pill is a reminder, not a block — the row stays tickable, and ticking it runs another full detection and creates another set of groups.

What each ticked pattern produces

Detection runs once per ticked pattern, in the order the list shows, and each one behaves exactly like a manual sample:

• One Linear group per pipe size found on that service, named after the size, such as Ø22mm and Ø28mm. Runs whose size could not be read land in Unsized, and ducts in Duct.
• Two Count groups per sample holding the fittings, Sample 1 · Bends and Sample 1 · T-Junctions, with one small marker per fitting.
• The group colour is the colour of the ink that was detected, so the new groups match the drawing rather than a palette.

Sizes, bends, T-junctions and reducers explains those groups in full.

If Search all files in category is on, the same services are then looked for on the other drawings in the category in the background. See Takeoff on other drawings.

When a pattern finds nothing

If some of the patterns you ticked produced no runs, an amber notice appears in the takeoff panel above the sidebar group list, reading for example 1 of 2 selected patterns found no runs. Dismiss it with the beside it.

That usually means the pattern belongs to something that is not a service — a hatch, a border, a revision cloud — rather than a run the app failed to trace.

Runs drawn as filled shapes

Not every CAD export draws a pipe as a stroked line. Some render every dash and dot of a linetype as a filled shape, and some draw containment as a filled bar with an invisible outline. Those drawings used to list stray fragments in this window, or nothing at all.

ZeroCount now reads those as linework, so filled dashes, dots and bars are found in both Auto Detect (pick line patterns) and manual sampling, and the service is listed rather than fragments of it. Sampling a filled bar by hand no longer depends on hitting the exact centre of the bar.

Common issues

"No coloured line patterns found on this drawing."

The window shows this when the analysis finished but found nothing it could offer. The most common causes are:

• The services are drawn in black or grey. The picker lists coloured patterns only. Take those services off one at a time with Auto Linear (sample one line) instead.
• The drawing has no linework of its own — a scanned sheet with very light or broken lines, or a sheet that is mostly text and symbols.
• The sheet is a schedule or a detail sheet rather than a layout.

A pattern is listed twice

One colour can appear as both a Solid and a Dashed row when the drawing uses the same pen for two different things, for example a solid title-block border and a dashed service. Tick only the row that matches the service.

Too many groups came back

Every ticked pattern creates its own groups, so ticking six patterns creates at least six sets. Tick two or three at a time, check the result, then come back for the rest.

Next steps

• Auto Takeoff from one sample — take off one service at a time, and the way to reach black or grey services.
• Sizes, bends, T-junctions and reducers — what the groups a detection leaves behind mean.
• Tidying takeoff results — clear the overlay markings and remove junk runs.
• Takeoff on other drawings — the background search across the rest of the category.