Equipment Module Highlighting

Equipment Module Highlighting draws a coloured shape around every valve of every Equipment Module on the P&ID — one shape per valve, coloured by the module the valve belongs to. It is activated from the 🔧 Equipment Module Ribbon Highlight panel, and is also reachable from the Module ribbon's Highlight dropdown. The overlays are transient graphics — they appear only while AseptSoft is active, they leave no entities in the drawing, and they never end up in a saved DWG.

💡 Why use highlighting? On a busy P&ID with dozens of valves, it is hard to tell at a glance which valve belongs to which Equipment Module. The highlights turn the relationship into a visual colour language — anyone reviewing the drawing, from process engineers to QA auditors, can see module membership instantly, and a one-click toggle switches between the "clean" view and the annotated view.

🔘 Toggle highlighting on and off

The Highlight split button on the Equipment Module Ribbon's Highlight panel is the primary control:

• Click the button itself to toggle highlights on and off for every Equipment Module in the active module. While active the button shows Unhighlight with a hide icon; while inactive it shows Highlight with a highlight icon.

• Click the dropdown caret to access the full menu:

  • Highlight All EMs — same as the toggle when inactive.

  • Unhighlight All EMs — clears all overlays.

  • Customize Highlights… — opens the settings dialog described below.

🏭 Pharma Example: Your CIP skid drawing has three Equipment Modules — Supply Pump (blue), Heat Exchanger (orange), Return Manifold (green). Click Highlight; every valve of the Supply Pump gets a blue circle, every valve of the Heat Exchanger an orange circle, every valve of the Return Manifold a green circle. At a glance, the module memberships are obvious. Click again to return to the clean P&ID view.

Reaching the toggle from the Module ribbon

The same overlay can be flipped from the Module ribbon's Highlight dropdown via the Show / Hide EM Control Modules entry, so you do not have to switch tabs to the Equipment Module ribbon just to toggle the halos. The two surfaces drive the same overlay and stay in sync — toggling from either ribbon updates both buttons, so they can never disagree about whether the overlay is on.

🎛️ EM-cell control highlights

An Equipment Module configuration can declare that a particular valve is under the control of an instrument for the step the module is currently in — directly inside the configuration's cells, without anyone having to wire up a separate live control relationship on the drawing. When a configuration cell names a controlling instrument for a valve, that valve receives the very same control highlight it would get from a hand-wired control loop: the same shape, the same colour, the same connector geometry.

If a configuration cell happens to mirror a control relationship that already exists live on the drawing, the highlight is drawn only once — the two never stack a duplicate marker on the same valve.

🚨 Instrument-alarm highlights

Alongside the equipment-module halos, AseptSoft can mark every instrument that participates in an alarm. When the alarm overlay is on, each instrument referenced by at least one configured alarm is drawn with a red diamond (a square rotated to read as a rhomboid), a ⚠ ALARM banner above it, and the names of the alarms it belongs to listed below.

The diamond is deliberately a different shape from the square instrument frames, so it can never be confused with the regular monitoring/controlling markers and it stacks cleanly on top of them — an alarm-tagged controlling instrument shows both its magenta square and its red diamond at once. The instruments are found by the same scan the instrument hover popup uses, so the diamonds and the popup always list the same alarms.

🏭 Pharma Example: A WFI distribution loop has a pressure transmitter PIT-101 wired into a high-high and a low alarm. Switch on Show Instrument Alarms and PIT-101 gains a red diamond with a ⚠ ALARM banner and both alarm names listed beneath it — so a reviewer can scan the loop and immediately see which instruments carry alarms, without opening each one.

🎨 Customize the highlight appearance

The Customize Highlights… menu item opens a settings dialog. Changes apply immediately to any highlights that are currently visible, and are remembered for the current environment so every drawing you open uses the same look.

The colour of each halo is not set in this dialog — it comes automatically from the Equipment Module's colour. Change a module's colour and its highlights re-render in the new colour the next time they are activated.

📄 Include highlights in the PDF export

The Export Processes to PDF window has a Highlights group with two checkboxes, so you can choose which overlays travel into the exported bundle:

For each checkbox that is ticked, the export activates that overlay before each page is plotted and restores the previous on-screen state afterwards, so every exported page shows the chosen shapes. Both preferences are remembered, so subsequent exports default to the same settings.

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