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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A little bit more blur, maybe. :-)
Now, this functionality is likely very cheap, and could therefore be an option...
But highlighting of 'pharma alerts' would be a nice 'addon' too... a pharma JCP applet would automatically highlight chemical fragments marked as 'DONT_DO_THAT', for example, with such a shadow, but maybe pink or orange to make it stand out... So, the add-on would consist of a list of such alert fragments, or possibly use a webservice for that.
Such an 'addon' would certainly be more computer power demanding, but is what we should aim for. This will give JCP the edge it needs to become mainstream and replace ChemWriter, JME, MarvinApplet...