What you can change
A marker group's appearance has up to five properties:
- Colour — applied to every marker in the group.
- Width — the line thickness for outline-based markers, or the marker size for point markers.
- Opacity — how solid the markers look.
- Manual Detection Width — only for Detection groups containing ellipse-style markers — the size of manually-placed detections.
- Manual Detection Opacity — same idea, for opacity.
All five sit in the Marker Group Config dropdown, accessed by clicking the colour swatch / thumbnail on a group's row.
Opening the appearance dropdown
- 1
In the sidebar, click the colour swatch at the left of the group row. (For Detection groups this is the symbol thumbnail.)
- 2
The Marker Group Config dropdown opens with the colour grid and sliders.
- 3
Make your changes — they're previewed on the canvas live but not committed yet.
- 4
Click Apply to save. Apply is only enabled when something has changed. Cancel discards the preview.
Colour
The colour grid shows the standard ZeroCount palette — 6 columns of colour swatches taken from the MARKER_GROUP_COLORS constant. Click any swatch to select it. The chosen colour is shown highlighted.
Colour is the single most useful appearance property — pick contrasting colours for groups that sit close together on the drawing so they're easy to tell apart.
Use a consistent colour scheme across projects. Many teams adopt conventions like "red for lighting, blue for small power, green for fire alarm" so anyone opening a drawing can tell what's what at a glance.
Width
Range: 1 to 20. Controls:
- Linear groups — the line thickness of each Linear marker.
- Area groups — the border thickness of each Area polygon.
- Detection / Unit groups — generally not exposed; some marker shapes use it for outline thickness.
Set it from the Width slider in the dropdown.
If markers look too thick and are hiding the drawing, drop the width down. If they're too thin to see on a busy drawing, push it up.
Opacity
Range: 5% to 100%.
Controls how solid the markers look. Lower opacity lets the drawing show through; higher opacity makes the markers dominate.
The right value depends on what you're doing:
- Reviewing the takeoff — 50–80% so you can see both the marker and the underlying symbol.
- Exporting a PDF for sharing — 80–100% so the markers read clearly.
- Sanity-checking against the legend — 30–50% so the marker doesn't obscure the legend symbol.
Set it from the Opacity slider in the dropdown.
Manual Detection Width and Opacity
Only shown for Detection groups that contain ellipse-style markers (the default for Auto Count Symbol detections).
- Manual Detection Width — range 10 to 100. The ellipse radius used for manual Detection markers.
- Manual Detection Opacity — range 5% to 100%. Same idea as the group-level opacity but specifically for manually-added Detection markers.
Use these when manually-added markers look out of proportion to the auto-detected ones. The default of 50/50 works for most drawings.
Applying changes
The Apply button at the bottom of the dropdown is the only way to commit your changes. Apply is disabled until you actually change something.
Once applied:
- Every marker in the group updates on the canvas immediately.
- The Excel export's colour-swatch column reflects the new colour next export.
- The change is saved to the project automatically.