Our new Named Reactions Library is coming along nicely. We’ve just clocked 100 named reactions but are still adding to it!

For those newcomers among us, ‘named’ reactions are those organic chemical transformations named after their discoverer. The first named reaction most of us encounter is the Wurtz reaction for making alkanes. It’s in there with many others!

Here’s a sneak peek:

We hope to release this soon at a really competitive price for students and educators.

Reaction mechanisms are a pivotal teaching tool, conveying exactly how and why organic reactions work the way they do. We will soon support several electron types – radicals, lone pairs, charges and carbenoids – and the electron pushers that form and break bonds.

We’ve been beavering away on making our ACME chemical editor support these features, and on drawing them in Word. It’s been challenging work. There are a lot of subtleties about drawing mechanisms that we take for granted when using a pen and paper.

But this release will put first-class chemistry in the hands of the people who will make best use of it: the learners who will make up the next generation of chemists, and the teachers who inspire them.

You’ll soon be able to draw beautiful reactions like these. Watch this space for further developments!

With this release we have added the following changes

• New Feature: Showing of Implicit Hydrogen labels and Showing of Carbon labels is now hierarchical
• BugFix: Prohibit search for empty string
• UX: Tweaking of list of names to be shown and de-duplicate dropdown list for ShowAs
• BugFix: Copy/Paste of structure into another document – Pasted structure sometimes not editable. (Warning: The CML for this chemistry item can’t be found!)

Showing of Implicit Hydrogen labels and Showing of Carbon labels is now hierarchical

These settings apply to new structures which can be from new drawing, file import or search

NB: Your existing structures will not be altered. To change them you should edit them and apply user defaults.

BugFix: Prohibit search for empty string

Previously this was allowed and generated an error.

UX: Tweaking of list of names to be shown and de-duplicate dropdown list for ShowAs

We have been asked to not show duplicates in this list.

BugFix: Copy/Paste of structure into another document – Pasted structure sometimes not editable. (Warning: The CML for this chemistry item can’t be found!)

We think that this issue is now solved, please let us know if it still happens for you (either via GitHub or FaceBook)

It’s a valid question.

After all, there are now lots of chemical content creation tools. Some, like ChemDraw, and Biovia Draw have been around for decades and are well-established. They come with lots of nice features. You don’t have to look far to find something that fits your needs.

So why Chem4Word? If you are a student, teacher, professional chemist or simply interested in chemistry, Chem4Word is for you. You can create your own documents with fully semantic chemistry. No other chemical drawing tool supports this.

Here are some more reasons why you should use Chem4Word:

Chem4Word is free!

That’s right: completely free. The Chem4Word application is and will continue to be free. Whether you’re a student, teacher or professional scientist, the Apache 2.0 license means that you can use it completely free of charge! You can distribute the package as you see fit.

Chem4Word understands Word.

We designed Chem4Word to fully integrate with Microsoft Word. And everything is at your fingertips. No more cutting and pasting between apps. No more scratching-about, trying to find favourite molecules!

Our in-document rendering of chemistry is class-leading. Our ACME editor is fast, powerful and responsive, and fully supports reactions.

Chem4Word comes with Libraries

You can store chemistry and search for it easily. Soon, we’ll be allowing you to compose and support your own libraries of molecules and reactions.

We Support Open Information!

Too much important information is locked away. Even when you create your own, the people who produce the tools make it difficult for you to get at.

Chem4Word opens the information up for anyone to consume! Chemical Markup Language (CML) underpins it all. And it’s human readable and you can extract chemistry from documents. Your content is open and reusable!

We Listen to Your Needs.

Our FaceBook group allows you to tell us what you want from Chem4Word. Join it and start talking today!

To celebrate WebMolkit having its license changed to Apache 2.0 we are working on allowing end users to read and write SketchEl files. The full specification for SketchEl files can be found in GitHub here.

This new converter is present in V3.3 of Chem4Word.

Implementation notes

1. Chem4Word does not support quadruple bonds.
   These will be converted to zero bonds.
2. Chem4Word does not support stereo features on anything other than single bonds.
   If stereo features are encountered then the bond type is set to single.
3. Abbreviations which are unknown to Chem4Word will be converted to “??”
   This is our internal indication of Unknown atom type.
4. Other features of the SketchEl file that Chem4Word does not support are gracefully ignored.

If you want to have a “play” with creating SketchEl files, please head off to the main Molecular Materials Information home page, there is a demo of the WebMolkit Sketcher a little way down the page.

Note: If you have a SketchEl file that you want to import into Sketcher / WebMolkit and you are using Windows you must use <Ctrl>+<Shift>+V to paste in the structure from your clipboard.