Am Dienstag, 25. Oktober 2005 20:56 schrieb Mojca Miklavec:
Jörg Hagmann wrote:
I am sure PPCHTEX would do a better job.
If PPCHTeX is capable of drawing your formulas. I tried it, and apart from complicated notation it can not draw seven rings, and you need "work arounds" for certain bond angles, and there were other things either very complicated to code or not at all. There seems to be no big user community of PPCHTeX and no development.
I may be wrong, but I doubt that PPCHTEX would satisfy your needs. It's a complicated notation which is not flexible enough
Have a look into the PPCHTEeX-manual and see if it covers all your needs.
XymTeX is more powerful, but not supported by ConTeXt and still with very complex notation.
True, and also XyMTeX lacks a lot of possibilities - apart from seven rings many bicyclo-compounds are not possible, if I remember right. Additionally, it is not possible to colorize bonds and atoms or to make them bold etc. (this is possible with PPCHTeX). Then there is ochem by Ingo Klöckl, perhaps the most powerful chemistry solution in terms of possible compounds - but only for LaTeX, and again with a very peculiar notation and a steep learning curve. Colorization of bonds only with PostScript-editing. Finally there is streetex by Igor Strokov - again for LaTeX, more powerful in terms of possible compounds than PPCHTeX or XyMTeX and much easier (more intuitive) to use. However, as with XyMTeX it is not possible to colorize bonds and atoms or to make them bold etc.
I would say that all you need is a better export from Chemdraw
Recent versions of Cambrigde Soft ChemDraw can produce very nice output in various formats. Additionally, ChemDraw has the feature IUPAC name to structure - this is very handy, and no TeX-solution has that. Yours sincerely Tobias Hilbricht