As I am reading a book called "Symmetry in Chemistry" (H. H. Jaffé and M. Orchin) I thought I would try out a couple of examples that they use. One is 1,2-dichlorocylopropane : which is, apparently, dissymmetric because it has a symmetry element (a C2 axis) but is optically active. Incidentally, wedges can look horrible in small structures - this is why: The box around the hydrogen is shaded in grey, to show the effect of overlap. A possible fix might be to shorten the wedge, but sadly this would require working out the bounds of the text when calculating the wedge, which has to be done at render time. Oh well. Another interesting example is this 'spiran', which I can't find on ChEBI or ChemSpider: Image again courtesy of JChempaint . I guess the problem marker (the red line) on the N suggests that it is not a real compound? In any case, some simple code to determine potential chiral centres (using signatures) finds 2 in the cyclopropane structure, and 4 in the ...
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1. mouse events happen in Java2D or SWT (or...)
2. needs to be converted into something platform independent
3. gesture events need to be interpreted into editing actions
4. editing actions have to be called
Now, by carefully choosing the editing actions, we can make a scripting language at the same time. Is this important? I think so. This allows people to write simple scripts to add protective groups to molecules, or ...
Step 2 is important to allow creation of editing frameworks for applets and RCP without having to depend on buggy AWT-SWT bridges, which has given many of us very bad headaches.