We describe a method for symbol spotting in born-digital architectural floor plans, which are a particularly challenging application domain of graphics recognition. We propose a hybrid method that capitalizes on strengths of both vector-based and pixel-based symbol spotting techniques. In the description phase, the salient geometric constituents of a symbol are extracted by a variety of vectorization techniques, including a proposed voting-based algorithm for finding partial ellipses. This enables us to better handle local shape irregularities and boundary discontinuities, as well as partial occlusion and overlap. In the matching phase, the spatial relationship between the geometric primitives is encoded via a primitive-aware proximity graph. A statistical approach is then used to rapidly yield a coarse localization of symbols within the plan. Localization is further refined with a pixel-based step implementing a modified cross-correlation function. Experimental results on the public SESYD synthetic dataset demonstrate that our approach clearly outperforms other popular symbol spotting approaches. Moreover, our approach yields promising results on real-world images, which are significantly more challenging in terms of overlap, occlusion, and presence of non-symbolic graphical data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]