Chemistry

Chemtool: Open-source Chemical Structure drawing program

Hazem Abbas

Oct 27, 2020 — 2 min read

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: