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's activated from the 🔧 Equipment Module Ribbon Highlight panel with a single toggle button. 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:
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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.
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Click the dropdown caret to access the full menu:
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Highlight All EMs — same as the toggle when inactive.
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Unhighlight All EMs — clears all overlays.
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Customize Highlights… — opens the settings dialog described below.
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🏭 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.
🎨 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.
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Setting |
What it controls |
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Shape |
Circle (default), Square (same size in both dimensions), or Rectangle (matches the valve's bounding box proportions). |
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Size Multiplier |
Scales the shape relative to the valve's bounding box. 1.0× fits exactly; 1.2× (the default) leaves a small gap; 2.0× produces a generous frame; 0.5× a tight halo. |
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Line Weight |
AutoCAD lineweight for the shape outline. |
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Line Type |
Any linetype loaded in the drawing (Continuous, DASHED, DASHDOT, …). Dashed shapes are useful when you want the highlights to read as an annotation rather than a boundary. |
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Automatically enable highlighters when opening the AseptSoft Module |
When checked, opening any AseptSoft module activates the highlights without requiring the Highlight button. Useful if you always want the annotated view. |
The colour of each highlight 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 Equipment Module Highlights group with a single checkbox — Include EM highlight overlays in export. When checked, the export activates the highlights before each page is plotted and restores the previous state afterwards. Every exported PDF page therefore shows the coloured shapes around the valves. The preference is remembered so subsequent exports default to the same setting.
🔗 Related pages
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Page |
Why |
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The ribbon hosting the Highlight toggle split button. |
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Defining and colouring Equipment Modules (the colour source for the highlights). |
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Option to include the highlights in exported PDFs. |