Alleviate Duplicate Counts (Potential Solution)- Leverage Symbol Elements

Auto Count is already very strong, but one improvement could materially increase accuracy for electrical, fire alarm, security, HVAC, and other symbol-heavy trades: recognize the individual elements within a compound symbol and use them to prevent duplicate counting.

Example:

A drawing may contain:

• TS = Tamper Switch
• WF = Waterflow Switch
• WF/TS = a combined Waterflow + Tamper assembly

Today, if I Auto Count the combined WF/TS symbol and later Auto Count standalone TS symbols, the TS portion inside the combined symbol will also be picked up—creating a duplicate.

Ideally, Auto Count would understand:

WF/TS = WF element + TS element

Then, when searching for standalone TS, it would recognize that a matching TS already exists as an element within a previously counted compound symbol and exclude it.

The key concept is leveraging the individual vector/image elements that make up each symbol, not just treating the symbol as one flat image.

For example, a combined WF/TS symbol may be made up of roughly 10 individual elements, while the standalone TS may consist of only 5 of those elements. A smarter recognition engine could use that relationship to understand that the TS is a subset of the larger WF/TS symbol.

A useful workflow would be:

• User first creates a TS count based on the 5 elements that define the standalone TS.
• Auto Count finds all matching TS instances, including TS elements that may be part of larger compound symbols.
• User then creates a WF/TS count using the full compound symbol, which contains additional elements.
• When the stronger/larger match is identified, zzTakeoff recognizes that the previously counted TS belongs inside the WF/TS symbol and reassigns that count from TS to WF/TS rather than leaving both counts in place.

This would effectively create a hierarchy of symbol matches where the more complete element match takes priority over a partial/subset match.

There may be additional logic required but the important concept is:

Use symbol recognition + element-level comparison + match priority/reassignment to prevent duplicate counts between standalone and compound symbols.

That would significantly improve Auto Count accuracy for trades where symbols frequently share common sub-elements.

Also - Seperate item (Useful Nice to have but not critical). In lieu of applying a symbol overlay (star, square, etc.) on top of the counted items, have the individual symbol's geometry highlighted. It is much easier to to quickly verify what has been counted, if duplicates exist, and what still remains.