Chemtool 1.6.10

Chemtool project is a small program for drawing chemical structures on Linux and Unix systems using the GTK toolkit under X11.
Chemtool relies on transfig by Brian Smith for postscript printing and exporting files in PicTeX and EPS formats. Its companion program, XFig, is recommended for enhancing the output of chemtool, and for creation of 2D diagrams and schematics in general.
Both are included with most distributions of Linux, and are available through a number of websites including www.xfig.org. If you want to import chemtool drawings into word processing programs other than LaTeX, you will probably want to add a preview bitmap to them, as neither StarOffice/OpenOffice nor that software from Redmond seem to be able to display postscript inserts on screen without them.
For this purpose, using either ps2epsi, which comes with ghostscript, or epstool, a part of gsview is recommended. Since chemtool-1.6, this option is supported directly (through the equivalent function offered by recent versions of transfig).
Chemtool was originally written by Thomas Volk, then a student of chemistry and biology at the university of Ulm, Germany. His version, which was described in an article in the german periodical LinuxMagazin, was using plain X11.
The bond types available in chemtool are:
- 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
Enhancements:
- PNG export, kprinter support, and a few new template structures were added.
- Screen rendering of complex labels was improved.
- Several problems with text input in UTF8-enabled locales were fixed.
- Arrowhead size in EPS output and the appearance of arrowheads, superscripts, and national characters in SVG output were fixed.