The drought of chemical drawing software continues - here is the story. Every so often I see how Linux is doing and use it exclusively for a week or two. It is actually a usable desktop environment now, unlike a few years ago, but there isnt anything to draw decent structures. Today I set up XDrawChem, which is the basic idea of ChemDraw or ISIS, but less pretty and functional. I know I could get ChemDraw running on wine, but I can't find the disks. Anyway, onward and upward...tosyl chloride.
I have previously mentioned toluenesulfonic acid on the blog. Its acid chloride, tosyl chloride, can be used to activate alcohols - if you tosylate one, it becomes a good leaving group, and you can convert it into whatever you're after.
It stinks. I think like buttered popcorn+organic solvent.
Actually, the InChI converter does an OK job with images, but it's still not good old CD.
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The best chemical drawing software is almost certainly inkscape.
http://www.scripps.edu/~ityonemo/codon.svg
(not quite complete yet)
Ummmmm, buttered popcorn+organic solvent. Uhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa...
For some strange reason, I enjoy the smell of tosyl chloride. Great reagent.
Oh, and you dump the peecee and get a mac. :)
Gotta second the lack of good chemistry drawing tools on Linux...and computational chem tools are even worse. There are all kinds of frontends to visualize the results of calculations (ghemical, for example), but only one program I've found (mpqc) that actually does calculations. Nevermind that I couldn't get mpqc working thanks to the bajillion special libraries it requires.
The Linux chemistry situation is frustrating...it's really much worse than people let on.
Nobody else in my lab thinks it smells like popcorn - glad to see I'm not alone
The Windows chemistry situation is frustrating. ChemDraw *still* crashes soo much and while its "simplify" function is good for small molecules, it's simply frustrating to watch it try to second guess you on more complicated ones (you can't simplify sections without often screwing up your whole structure). And it's awful how doing some things are rediculously hack-ey (like how modifying atoms is the same as modifying text). And sometimes it gets confused when you switch the "scale" of you bonds, and adds in your "new atoms" with bonds lengths that are the old bond lengths.
Not to mention how CDX embedding in powerpoint *still* is no good when switching from Mac to PC.
That's why I use inkscape. You get 100% control over where every single bond goes, by directly editing the XML. 60 degree angles are up 18 pixels, over ten pixels. I blot out a 5 pixel radius around where I'm about to place an atom (using the cut path function) and that's that.
It can be a PITA to generate your first scaffold, but I know that it will always come out looking fabulous, and cut and paste are great ways to clone scaffolds without worrying about your software trying to screw you over.
ory. Every so often I see how Linux is doing and use it exclusively for a week or two
You should try a Mac. You get both UNIX and nice desktop software and you don't have switch back and forth. Plus, if you want to run Windows & Linux, you can do that, too.
pls suggest can we use popcorns as a drug delivery?