Chemtool: Open-source Chemical Structure drawing program
Table of Content
Chemtool is a lightweight application for drawing chemical structures like organic molecules. It's originally written by Thomas Volk from Germany. Later on, more developers came to aid for development and code maintenance.
Features
1- Drawing chemical bonds
It features creating several bond types as follows:
- 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
- a light (unfilled) pi orbital lobe
- a dark pi orbital lobe
2- Rings: Semiautomatic drawing of rings
3- Text tool;
Text can be written and inserted into any selected position with ease. It also can set into any chosen position and aligned (right, left and middle) to the drawing.
4- Drawing tools: moving, rotating, flipping and scaling
5- Printing;
Chemtool supports printing service through the default popular Linux printing services. It uses GhostScript and support any Postscript-capable printing device.
6- Templates
Predefined templates are another great feature for Chemtool. Users can set and save their templates for re-use later on.
7- Importing from PDB file format and OpenBabel.
8- Shortcuts: Chemtool offers handy shortcuts which makes it super productive.
9- Exporting to multiple formats:
- X bitmap,
- encapsulated PostScript (with optional preview image included)
- SVG,
- XFig,
- MDL molfile,
- PicTeX,
- PNG,
- EMF metafile,
- OpenOffice SXD drawing
- any chemical file format supported by OpenBabel (if that is installed)
Platforms
The program is created for Linux X systems, it does not work on Windows or macOS.
License
Chemtool is released under GNU General Public License.
