How to?? Please help a newbie.

rpost · 2025-01-22T12:56:15+00:00

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I am a new user with very limited experience: I am looking to highlight the flow path along a piping and instrumentation diagram and capture a list of piping and components that appear along highlighted "route". If this is possible, someone please point me in the right direction.

Additionally, I would like to do the above for multiple flow-paths (some of which are overlapping flowpaths) and would like to be able to create layers to see these flow paths such that I can turn the layers on and off.

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Jes Stafford

Could you post a pdf snip of said the piping and instrumentation diagram?

bcostlow

I think one tool that could be helpful is dynamic fill. There's a discussion highlight for it that could help a bit. If the document already has the instrumentation labeled, perhaps OCR would be needed to get the text to be useable as markups?

Now, if you mean you are drawing the flow by hand, you'd basically just have to play around with the different markup and sketch tools, under the Tools tab of the menu bar.

Let us know if that helps, if you need clarification, or if you could give us more details to better help you out. Good luck!

rpost

@Jes Stafford

Here is a pdf snip if it helps to see what I am describing:

Jes Stafford

Got it. So, the highlight part is a little easier than the "capture" part of your task here.

Rather than using the highlight tool, which will only work on OCR text to snap to a line, I suggest tracing the pipe routes with your Polyline tool, opening PROPERTIES, jacking up the lineweight to a width that works, then selecting color and reducing Opacity to make the fat line look like a highlighter, in the color you want. Once you get that set, right click it, and select Save as Default, or Add to Tool Chest so you will be able to draw many of these without changing these settings every time.

For the overlapping lines, I would follow the cues for a start/stop overlap from the background drawing.

As for capturing the list of piping and components, I guess the count tool would help, with a new count for each component along each line, or one for each type of component if a count for the entire sheet works….

How does that work?