In my opinion - it's not only its complexity preventing the users from using it, but also it's insufficient flexibility. As long as I understood the manual (and tried to draw some formulas), it is possible to create a certain subset of images, which covers the most needs, but certainly not all of them (there's no way to make such a trivial thing as a thetraedral or trigonal angle - 109.5 and 120 degrees). see: http://www.ntg.nl/pipermail/ntg-ppchtex/2002/000002.html Even the ones with lots of experience gave up. Perhaps chemistry is too complex to be applied easily without some help of graphical tools. SMILES (http://www.daylight.com/dayhtml/smiles/ssmiles.html) could be a solution, say \startSSMILES CC(=O)O \stopSSMILES producing a nice picture of acetic acid (using metafun), but perhaps still not serving all the puposes a chemist needs. Mojca Taco Hoekwater wrote:
Hi Thomas,
I believe your problem is that ppchtex is a very specialistic package and there are not that many people using it to it's full capacity. As a result of that, there isn't that much expert knowledge available. Personally, I don't understand any of it. Luckily, the only chemical stuff I have ever had to typeset could be done by cut&paste and making trivial changes to the examples in the manual.
Greetings, Taco
On Sun, 26 Sep 2004 07:47:18 +0200, Thomas wrote:
Hi to all,
One week is gone and I got no answer, no comment to my problems! What's going wrong!