Good morning!

I'm volunteering to help someone study chemistry. We need to practice reading and drawing structural formulae.

Does anyone know of a tool to generate the type of formulae shown in the image?

I've found several tools to create drawings of tructures, but none seem to include an option to generate a simple structural formula.

Searching for "chemistry structural formula" mostly gets me results about "organic structures" :(.

Thank you!

#question #chemistry #tool

@Liesvanrompaey Hi, I'm not really sure what you mean by generate a simple structural formula.
Do you want to draw/write the formula? I doubt there is software dedicated to draw that kind of formula with no angles. Maybe some latex package; but probably it'll be quicker to draw them in impress at that point.

To draw molecules you could look at xchemdraw (but it's a bit old) or marvinsketch; both are free. I attach an image of what you could get.

@rastinza

Thank you for looking into this.

I was hoping for something I found in Marvin. There is an option to enter a name and then the program draws the molecule.

Something like that but with simple structural formulae as output, would have been useful. That would allow me to quickly create worksheets with lots of structural formula to practice naming compounds.

I guess the student will manage if he can name skeletal formula.

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@Liesvanrompaey Oh, i see! Then I think the better option should be searching the names on a database, such as chemspider, chembl or pubchem and download the structural information in the SMILES format.
Then you can convert the smiles string into a structure with the properties you prefer; I believe Marvin should be able to convert a list of smiles into structures automatically.

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