How do I know what to put in for rules in the Altium Designer?

[matrixofdynamism]

The Altium Designer program has a very large set of rules that a person can specify for the PCB design process. So far I have not been able to find any type of "standard" rules file that I can import into the program. How does one know what rules to specify in the program? There are quite a LOT of rules to be specified in there. Also, if I am tampering with the rules, how can I put them back to the value that they were when I installed the program?

[Kean]

Start by reading the docs which gives some examples and covers the process

https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/pcb-design-rule-types
https://www.altium.com/documentation/altium-designer/defining-scoping-managing-pcb-design-rules

Rules are stored against a design, so no big worry about putting them back to installation defaults.  There are also options to export and import rules if you want to make a backup, or duplicate rules from one design into another.

The initial set of rules will be related to capabilities of your choice of PCB fabricator.  Some PCB fabs will provide a set of starting rules...

https://www.eurocircuits.com/altium-designer-templates-with-eurocircuits-design-rules/
https://support.jlcpcb.com/article/42-how-to-export-altium-pcb-to-gerber-files
https://docs.oshpark.com/design-tools/altium-designer/

Rules beyond that will depend on your design requirements, such as isolation distances between certain traces in a high voltage design, or for signal integrity if you are doing a high speed design.

[T3sl4co1l]

I mean, standard is whatever your in-house standard is.  (Great thing about standards, there are so many? )  The PCB template starts with a basic set of defaults, though there are some changes you'll normally like to do for most designs.

That said, here's more or less the common set I use:

Tim