Client Standards

Your house standard: the deviations your organisation makes from a base drawing standard — symbol artwork, tag formats and line colours — recorded once and applied to every drawing that uses that base standard.

What a client standard is

A base standard is a published one: ISO 10628-2, BS 1553 / BS 1646, ANSI/ISA 5.1. ErgoPlanner ships those, and a drawing picks one.

A client standard is what you add on top. Almost no organisation draws a published standard verbatim — a client insists on their own gate-valve artwork, their own equipment tag pattern, their own colour for potable water. A client standard records those deviations as a named, versioned overlay on one base standard, so the same rules apply to every drawing without anyone having to remember them.

Three things a client standard carries drive how your drawings read:

Part	What it does
Symbol overrides	Replace a base symbol's artwork or fill colour. Every symbol you do not override keeps the base standard's own.
Tag formats	The equipment / instrument / pipeline tag patterns used when tags are generated.
Line colours	Your house colour per service (potable water, sludge, compressed air, …).

A client standard is yours. It is stored against your organisation, and no other organisation on the platform can read or change it.

Where to find them

Catalogue editor → Client standards (/catalogue-editor, the Client standards tab).

The tab opens on the Definition sub-tab, with a picker across the top listing every client standard your organisation has. The remaining sub-tabs — Piping Specs, Compatibility Overrides, Approved Manufacturers, Validation Rules — scope their content to the standard selected here.

Creating a client standard

1. Select New standard.
2. Give it a Name — normally the client or house it belongs to.
3. Choose the Base standard. This is the important choice: its short code is what a drawing stores when it selects a standard, and it is how the canvas finds this overlay. A base standard already covered by one of your client standards is shown as "already has a standard" and cannot be chosen — one client standard per base standard.
4. Optionally set a Version and Description.
5. Create standard. The new standard is selected and opens on the Definition tab, ready to fill in.

You need the Manage company settings permission (Owner or Admin) to create, edit or delete a client standard. Anyone in the organisation can read them — that is what lets them apply for every user, not just admins.

Editing the definition

Everything on the Definition tab except symbol overrides saves together with one Save.

Standard

• Name, Version, Description — your own labels; Version is free text for your change tracking.
• Active — untick to stop the standard applying to drawings without deleting it. An inactive standard stays in the picker (marked inactive) so you can switch it back on.

Tag formats

One pattern per category. Placeholders are {TYPE}, {FUNC}, {AREA}, {SERVICE}, {SIZE} and {SEQ} — for example {TYPE}-{AREA}{SEQ} for equipment. Leave a category blank to inherit the base standard's format. A pattern with no recognisable placeholder is rejected on save.

Line colours

A hex colour per service, #RGB or #RRGGBB. The swatch beside each field previews it, and an invalid value is flagged before you save. Blank inherits the base standard.

Symbol overrides

Each override names a base symbol id, the replacement artwork, and a fill.

• Base symbol id — the id of the symbol you are replacing, e.g. gate-valve.
• Replacement artwork — either SVG markup (used as-is) or the id of another library symbol.
• Fill — a hex colour, applied as the symbol's default fill. Shapes inside the artwork that set their own colour keep it.

Overrides save immediately as you add and remove them, not with the Save button. Removing one returns that symbol to the base standard's artwork on every drawing using this client standard.

How it reaches your drawings

A drawing records a base standard in its canvas settings. When it opens, ErgoPlanner looks up your organisation's active client standard for that base standard and resolves every symbol through it.

Choose the base standard when you create the drawing. It is set in File → New (step 1), and today nothing in the editor changes it afterwards — the Drawing standard box in the Symbols panel picks the regional symbol set (ISO / BS / ISA), which is a different thing. If an existing drawing needs to move onto a house standard, ask your administrator; a per-drawing picker is on the roadmap.

Resolution runs in this order, first match wins:

1. a project-specific override on that element,
2. your client standard,
3. the drawing's base standard,
4. the symbol's own default artwork.

So a drawing on a base standard you have no client standard for renders exactly as it did before — nothing degrades, nothing errors. The same is true while the standards are still loading, and for drawings on a legacy standard code that no longer exists.

Choosing a drawing's standard

Two different things are chosen in Draw's Symbols panel, one above the other, and they do different jobs:

Control	What it changes	Where it is kept
Regional symbol standard	Which symbol packs the palette offers, and what Apply … to drawing re-maps placed symbols into (a gate valve becomes the other standard's gate valve).	Your own preference — it follows you, not the drawing.
Drawing standard	Which of your organisation's client standards re-skins this drawing: your artwork and your fill on the symbols your standard names. It does not change which symbol is placed.	Saved with the drawing.

To put an existing drawing on your house standard, open Symbols, pick it under Drawing standard, and save. The drawing re-skins as you choose it — no reload — and the minimap follows. Choose None (base library artwork) to take a drawing back off a house standard.

The list offers the client standards your organisation has authored. If it is empty, nobody has created one yet — see Creating a client standard above. A drawing that points at a standard someone has since removed keeps showing that standard's code, so you can see what it was set to rather than silently reading as unstyled.

New drawings pick their standard in the New-document dialog; this control is how an existing one is changed.

On the drawing canvas

Your symbol overrides are drawn on the canvas itself — you see your own artwork while you draw, not just in exports and previews.

• Overridden symbols show your replacement artwork and your fill, at every zoom level. The canvas draws symbols two ways depending on how much is on screen (individually when there are few, from a shared texture when there are many); both use your artwork, so it does not change as you zoom out.
• Everything else is untouched. A symbol your standard does not name looks exactly as it did before, and a drawing on a base standard you have no client standard for renders exactly as it did before.
• Switching a drawing's standard re-skins it immediately — no reload. The same is true when someone edits the standard in the catalogue editor: reopen the drawing (or switch standard and back) and the new artwork is there.
• The minimap shows your artwork too. The thumbnail in the corner draws the same symbols the canvas does, so it does not disagree with what you are looking at.
• A size override applies to symbols you place from then on. If your standard sets a width and height for a symbol, new placements use it, and the symbol's clickable area matches what is drawn. Symbols already on the drawing keep the size they were drawn at — changing a standard never moves or resizes existing work.

What is not yet on the canvas. The minimap still draws the standard symbol, so an overridden symbol looks different there from the way it looks on the canvas. Line colours are stored and served but connections still draw in the drawing's own line-type colours — a client standard does not yet recolour pipes on the canvas. An overridden symbol is fixed artwork, so its parametric adjustment handles (the yellow diamonds) are not shown and its per-element colour overrides do not apply — the house standard wins. Title blocks, material rules and calculation overrides are stored but not yet used.

Changes take effect the next time a drawing loads.

Deleting a client standard

Select it, then the bin icon beside New standard. Drawings on its base standard fall back to that base standard's own symbols and tag formats. Built-in standards cannot be deleted or edited — create your own to deviate from one.

Notes

• ErgoPlanner ships no pre-made operator or client packs. A client standard exists only because someone in your organisation authored it.
• The change history for a standard is available from History in the tab's top bar.

See also

• Creating a Drawing — choosing a drawing's base standard
• Labels and Tags — how tag formats are used
• Client standards (feature reference)