[seul-edu] Re: Open ChemDraw alternative?

[Michael Shigorin <mike@osdn.org.ua>]

On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 02:35:45PM -0300, Ben Armstrong wrote:
>    I think that the DebianEDu? distribution would be well served by a
>    solid organic structure drawing program on the order of Xdrawchem but
>    with facile spreadsheet and text document interaction. As an organic
>    chemist, I and my students spend a great deal of time in the Windows
>    environment using, Word, Excel, and a superior (but inordinately
>    expensive) piece of software called ChemDraw?.

AFAIR XDC is heading there; you could also look at chemtool and
some Java software in the Chemistry sections of freshmeat.net and
sal.kachinatech.com (suppose addressess well known to you).

Some thought here would be implementing/ironing out interaction
with LaTeX-based editors like LyX (so as to keep source file to
be opened for editing in a click, but substitute eps drawing in
the result) and/or OOo; XDC already does WMF (it seems) so it
shouldn't be really impossible. [side note: XDC's makefiles are
horrible regarding non-root builds! :(]

Some relatively mature software named CACTVS (with
source-on-real-demand for core Tcl libraries) is also available,
which interacts with SQL DBMSes and thus could be made to
interoperate that way (which seems quite logical to me).

I've broadly liked the Daylight drawing tool, but it's definitely
proprietary (though they're very nice people regarding keeping
opensource contribs and having Python bindings).

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@altlinux.ru>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/