Molecular diagramming software

[keithwms]

I agree with ic-racer, chemdraw is good. The problem I have with several of the fancier visualizer programs is that they can't spit out textbook-simple skeleton diagrams. Chemdraw can do that and it's relatively intuitive.

[Kirk Keyes]

Denise - I did try ACD Chem Sketch - but not for long. That could work I think.

ChemDraw - looks cool, but man, is it expensive. Or did I miss the cheap version.

[Kirk Keyes]

From the realm of Free Software, there is Easychem. GChemPaint is another.

Well, I see that's not only free as in beer, but free as in speech.\

If I was running Linux on a desktop (only servers at this point) I'd use them. Thanks.

[Lee L]

If I was running Linux on a desktop (only servers at this point) I'd use them. Thanks.

Assuming the computer you're on is your own, it's not that difficult to install linux to dual boot, giving you a choice of operating systems at boot time. Newer versions of linux can read/write MS Windows NTFS files so you could save bitmap or EPS output to your Windows partition if you needed that.

Both gchempaint and easychem are in Debian repositories, and appear to be in repositories for many other distributions as well, so it would only be a couple of mouse clicks to install.

Monetary cost and restrictions on usage are zero, and it wouldn't take much time.

Lee

[Kirk Keyes]

Lee, I'm quite familiar with Linux. I actually got a Linux System Admin certificate back in Y2K.

[Neanderman]

I've used MDL ISIS/Draw (now part of Symyx).

http://www.mdl.com/downloads/index.jsp

It is a "no-fee" download.

I'm not very good with it, but it seems to have good capabilities.

Ed

[Kirk Keyes]

Thanks - I'll check it out. I've been playing with Marvin Draw some more, and it does what I've asked so far fairly well.