word processor, imple notes, structural/molecular formulas, etc.

By giecz24 at Thu, Oct 11 2007 5:01pm |

I'm transfering some of my old notes into an electronic copy and am currently using pages and scrivener. While the notes are mostly in the narrative, inserting structural and molecular formulas (and other similar items)is wasting valuable time in these programs and was wondering if anyone had any sugestions for another word processor to use in order to help ease the pain, or perhaps another application that I can create structural/molecular formulas, cut and paste them.

I'm not a fan of LaTex. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Thu, 2007-10-11 20:23 — ghutchis

Structural Formulas = ChemDraw

I'd highly suggest ChemDraw for structural/molecular formulas. It's really the best product out there for the Mac.

There are other ways to do this, but ChemDraw is really designed to make chemists efficient IMHO.

Fri, 2007-10-12 01:19 — drc

ChemDraw

Geoff is correct ChemDraw is currently the best chemical drawing package on the Mac added to which many journals now expect structures to be submitted in .cdx format. It is very expensive however, but there are many discounts for students and for older versions of the software.

Fri, 2007-10-12 08:07 — giecz24

CHEMDRAW

I see that ChemDraw has a free demo download.... I'll give it a shot.... although it really is quite expensive to only be used for note transfer.

Anyone have any free or cheaper alternatives?

Fri, 2007-10-12 10:06 — ghutchis

Maybe Marvin Beans

ChemAxon's MarvinBeans Java applets are free and relatively decent. I've just found it to be generally slow.

Other than that, there are a few UNIX programs ported to the Mac, like XDrawChem.

Of course if you have an Intel-based Mac and Parallels or VMWare, there are also some free Windows-based drawing tools. But they don't exist to the same number on the Mac.

(In my case, I get ChemDraw at academic discount. YMMV.)

Sat, 2007-10-13 18:41 — cej38

ChemBio3d Ultra or GaussView

I would really like something with the functionality of ChemBio3d Ultra or GaussView 3 for the Mac.

Sat, 2007-10-13 20:43 — ghutchis

Try GaussView for Mac

There is GaussView for Mac (both version 3, and the new version 4).

There's also Spartan, HyperChem for Mac, PCModel, MOE...

Well, Apple has a huge database of Math and Science and Chemistry/Cheminformatics programs.

In this case, the original poster was looking for 2D structural diagram programs. Unfortunately, there aren't as many for Mac as for Windows. 3D modeling programs for the Mac? As you can see, that's not as big of an issue.