(no subject)

[wolffyluna]

I have complained about ChemDraw (a program for drawing chemical structures and doing math to them) before. I will likely complain about it again in the future.

But right now I am in love with it.

At the moment, I am using the fragmentation patterns of [Chemical A] to predict the fragmentation patterns of [Related Chemical B], and work out the mass of those fragments.

ChemDraw has a tool that calculates the size of fragments. Its as easy to use as drawing a line through where you want the fragmentation to happen. And it's making a painful task significantly less painful.

So thank you, ChemDraw.

Comments

[lunartulip]

I'm curious how ChemDraw compares with LaTeX's chemfig package, usability-wise. I vaguely recall my teacher having recommended it to me, during intro chemistry class; but I started out stubbornly sticking with chemfig, and then, after a homework wherein we had to draw some relatively-complex molecules and it took me over an hour, I jumped straight to "leave an empty space on the homework page and draw in pencil" and stuck with that for the rest of class.

(An example piece of chemfig syntax, from when I used it to draw an ibuprofen molecule, to convey some sense of how horrible it is:

C(-[2,.5]H)(-[4,.5]H)(-[6,.5]H)(-[0]C(-[6,.5]H)(-[2]C(-[0,.5]H)(-[2,.5]H)(-[4,.5]H))(-[0]C(-[2,.5]H)(-[6,.5]H)(-[0]C(=[1]C(-[3,.7]H)(-[0]C(-[1,.7]H)(=[7]C)))(-[7]C(-[5,.7]H)(=[0]C(-[7,.7]H)(-[1]C(-[0]C(-[6,.5]H)(-[2]C(-[0,.5]H)(-[2,.5]H)(-[4,.5]H))(-[0]C(=[2]\lewis{0:4:,O})(-[6]\lewis{0:6:,O}(-[4,.5]H))))))))))

)

[wolffyluna]

I'd think ChemDraw would likely be much more usable. It's very much like drawing the molecule by hand, plus the program sometimes being 'helpful' and getting in your way (and equally often being actually helpful, to be fair to the program.)

Admittedly, I didn't start using it willingly. For the first year or so of my degree, I hand drew my molecules, until in second year the professor of one of my classes was like "I refuse to try and puzzle out all of your handwriting; use Chemdraw."