Chemical Structure Drawing Software

by David Bradley

It's been a long time since I re-visited the subject of chemical structure drawing software packages, as chemistry consultant on Scientific Computing World it was almost a full-time job for me keeping on top of the latest packages on the market back in the 90s-00s, but these days I've moved away from that area. Whenever I need a chemical structure I turn to PubChem, ChEBI, or ChemSpider and then use JMol to render it in 2 D or 3D. If I need print-ready structures I've got Crystal Diamond and an open source 3D rendering engine.

Is there any interest in my compiling a list of the currently available chemical structure packages, I wonder?

Read the Chymical Wedding List - bonus feature in Issue 71 of Elemental Discoveries; we've also got a new feature listing the elemental discoveries timeline.