Chemtool 1.6.7 review

Chemtool is a small program for drawing chemical structures on Linux and Unix systems using the GTK toolkit under X11. Chemtool re

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 297K Developer: MKroeker

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Chemtool is a small program for drawing chemical structures on Linux and Unix systems using the GTK toolkit under X11.

Chemtool relies on transfig by Brian Smith for postscript printing and exporting files in PicTeX and EPS formats. Its companion program, XFig, is recommended for enhancing the output of chemtool, and for creation of 2D diagrams and schematics in general.

Both are included with most distributions of Linux, and are available through a number of websites including www.xfig.org. If you want to import chemtool drawings into word processing programs other than LaTeX, you will probably want to add a preview bitmap to them, as neither StarOffice/OpenOffice nor that software from Redmond seem to be able to display postscript inserts on screen without them.

For this purpose, using either ps2epsi, which comes with ghostscript, or epstool, a part of gsview is recommended. Since chemtool-1.6, this option is supported directly (through the equivalent function offered by recent versions of transfig).

Chemtool was originally written by Thomas Volk, then a student of chemistry and biology at the university of Ulm, Germany. His version, which was described in an article in the german periodical LinuxMagazin, was using plain X11.

The bond types available in chemtool are:

a single bond
a double bond (with one line shorter than the other)
a double bond (having the shorter line on the opposite side)
a centered double bond
a triple bond (with the flanking lines shorter than the center)
a wedge-shaped bond
a dashed wedge-shaped bond
a wavy line
a dashed wide line
a half arrow
an arrow
a wide bond
a circle
a dotted line
a single bond that 'cuts out' a segment from any bond it crosses
a triple bond (with equal line lengths)
a quadruple bond

What's New in This Release:
two new bond types for drawing p-orbitals
configurable distance between the individual lines of multiple bonds
"free electron pairs" drawn with the numeric keypad can be done in "two dots"-style by holding the shift key
SVG export has been adjusted to some limitations of the SVG "Tiny" specification (mobile devices) and the current Firefox "Deer Park" builds (without losing functionality)
chemtool can now export to OpenOffice SXD format when Alexander B?rger's fig2sxd is installed