Re: Tweaks to Dia for chemical diagrams

[Dave Linton <djl27 hermes cam ac uk>]

On Tue, 17 Jul 2001, Lars Clausen wrote:

> Sounds like a good area to use Dia in.  I'm just worried that for actual
> chemical drawings, you'll want a much higher abstraction level.  Have
> you looked at the (La)TeX chemical packages?  They seem to be quite
> nice.

ChemDraw has very little abstraction, beyond irritatingly thinking it
knows best in a couple of situations, so we're used to drawing structures
with little more than a triangular grid (ChemDraw's options are actually
'fix line length to certain value' and 'fix angles to 15 degree multiples'
rather than a triangular grid, plus snapping to vertices and a whole load
of templates for things like 7-membered rings that don't easily draw
under those constraints.)

'ochem' for LaTeX looks pretty impressive in its capabilities, I might
look into that (i.e. try and find a manual that isn't in German :-/ )
Although I'd still be surprised if it could adequately handle complex
inorganic structures (like the ones I'll be drawing, unfortunately)
without an awful lot of coaching.

I may have broken the thread here, since I was only subscribed to the
digest, so I don't have the references... oosp.

drgs
Dave
.