What is JChemPaint?

JChemPaint [KRA00] is an editor for 2D Molecular Structures, like this one here . JChemPaint is intended to be complementary to JMol( http://www.openscience.org/jmol), a visualisation and analysis tool for 3D molecular structures, which is, like JChemPaint, developed by an international team of open source programmers.
In at least three aspects JChemPaint is different from other programs of this sort:
  1. JChemPaint is an open source program [OS]. It is Free Software.

    We believe that scientific software, especially when its development was publicly funded, should be free. As the GNU (http://www.gnu.org) people put it: Free Software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free speech', not 'free beer.' ".

    Everyone can participate in the development of the program. Everyone can download and change the source code, provided that he makes the changes publicly available again, according to the GNU General Public License (GPL) or GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), depending on the classes which have been changed.

    This ensures that the community can take advantage of any bugfix/enhancements made to the system.

    It also ensures that a scientist, who needs a standard piece of software like a structure editor as a helper application in her new program, does not have to reinvent the wheel over and over again because all the structure editors that have been written before are now propriety software. If there is a free structure editor, she can focus on the real science.

  2. You can participate in its development.
  3. Since JChemPaint is written in Java it runs on any computing platform and operating system for which a Java Virtual Machine (of version >= 1.4) has been implemented (like Linux, Windows 95/98/NT/Me/XP, Solaris, AIX and others) .
  4. JChemPaint is avaiblable free of charge.
JChemPaint in its currently release supports:
  1. Drawing features to draw all common chemical structure, the most important ones being
    1. drawing of single, double and triple bonds
    2. drawing stereo bonds
    3. setting attributes of atoms, like charges, isotopes, valences
    4. deleting of bonds and atoms
    5. common ring templates and custom ring closures
  2. Loading and saving of structures in Chemical Markup Language (CML) [PMR99], [ WIL2001 ] and as MDL Molfiles and SDF files (Load only for the latter)[DAL92].
  3. Automated Structure Layout, also known as Structure Diagram Generation [HEL99], [BLE91].
  4. Pasting structures as SMILES strings from the clipboard.
  5. Saving bitmap pictures of the structures.
  6. Saving structures as Scalable Vector Graphics ( SVG )
  7. Postscript printing.