Services, Mask and Coverage

Three tools for reading a busy drawing

A mechanical or electrical drawing usually carries several services on one sheet: cold water, heating, lighting, fire detection, all drawn over the same floor plan. Once ZeroCount has counted and measured them, the sidebar holds dozens of marker groups and the drawing is covered in markers. The three features in this section help you organise those groups, look at one service at a time, and check what a set of components actually covers.

Key features

• Services — named sections in the marker sidebar, such as Cold Water or Heating, that hold related marker groups. A Service carries its groups through to the Live Legend, the Excel export and the mask picker. Services are not the same as Categories, which organise drawings on the project page. See Grouping marker groups into Services.
• The mask — fades the drawing and every marker except the groups you choose, so one service can be read in isolation. A bar at the bottom of the canvas shows what is masked, with an opacity slider to bring the drawing back as far as you need. See Mask view.
• Pipe size badges — while a linear group is masked, its pipe size repeats along each run and the sizes found on the drawing sit on the mask bar as draggable Ø badges. Drop one on a run to file it under that size. See Pipe size badges.
• Splitting and joining runs — the Split chip on the mask bar cuts a run where its diameter changes and places a Reducer; dragging runs together joins them or creates a T-junction. See Splitting and joining runs.
• Coverage discs — give a Detection or Count group a radius in metres and every marker in it gets a shaded disc drawn to the drawing's scale, so you can see whether sprinklers or detectors blanket the floor or leave gaps. See Coverage view.

How they fit together

Services are the organising layer. Assign your groups to Services first and everything downstream follows: the mask picker lists groups under their Service with a mask all link per Service, size drops file a run into the matching-size group of the same Service, and Auto Takeoff creates separate Bends and T-Junctions groups for each Service.

The mask is the viewing layer. It changes nothing about your counts or measurements; it only fades what you are not looking at. Everything on the mask bar, including size badges, the Split chip and coverage discs, works on the groups currently in the mask.

Coverage discs are a lens over the mask. They are drawn on top of the faded drawing for the Detection and Count groups you have picked, and they disappear when you leave the mask.

Next steps

Start with Grouping marker groups into Services to give your sidebar some structure, then read Mask view to learn the three ways in and what the bar offers. If you are working on pipework, continue to Pipe size badges and Splitting and joining runs; for fire, sprinkler or lighting layouts, go to Coverage view.