[texhax] Chemistry molecular structures

Robin Fairbairns Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk
Mon Mar 1 21:32:10 CET 2004


> Note that nonsensical structures can be drawn with this package
> for example the structure headed \naphdrv[ob] has a pentavalent carbon
> atom ... even first year students shouldn't be making a mistake like
> this! 

but then, not even i (who never finished my first year of natural
sciences) would have issued such a patently foolish command.

> If you want proper chemical structures do not use LaTeX packages; all
> the ones that I have seen do not have sufficient intelligence and the
> requisite power to do chemical structures properly, and, they are
> very hard to use.

this could be said of almost any graphical language expressed in tex.
yet there are fields of endeavour in which pretty much the only
reasonable representation is so drawn.  if you _know_ that you can
represent the molecules you want to talk about, using xymtex (or the
like), why bother to learn any other package?  after all, one man's
package of choice is another man's "hard to use" -- else the world would
be overrun by latex users :-)

robin


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