Tet, rahedron Computer Methodology, Vol.3, No. 6B, pp. 523-524, 1990 " 0898-5529/90 $5.00+.00 -- Pergamon Press Ltd

printed in Great Britain

Software Reviews

PLT Vers ion 5.0, RYLAZ Products, 514 Edward St., Madison, WI 53711, USA. (608) 274-7637. Suggested retail price: $80.00 for IBM PC/XT/AT/PS2 VGA, EGA, CGA, Hercules computers.

PLT is a program for drawing chemical structures and plotting or printing them. It can also be used to draw other figures such as circles, arcs, ellipses, and curves (Bezier, sine, cosine, Gaussian, Lorenzian). Thus, this program can be used to generate publication quality drawings in all areas of chemistry.

The only special hardware requirement is that it needs at least 400K of available memory (500K to print large drawings). Otherwise, it will run on just about any MS-DOS computer (8086, 80286, 80386, 80486). It supports CGA, EGA, VGA, and Hercules monochrome graphics. It supports Hewlett-Packard plotters, Hewlett- Packard Laserjet printers, Postscript printers, and a variety of 9-, 16-, and 24-pin dot matrix printers (Epson, IBM NEC, etc.). In addition, it can generate HI~L or EPS files so that plots can be imported by other programs. It can be run from 360K floppy disks, but high density floppy disks or a hard drive is recommended. It supports, but does not require, a mouse. It was tested on both an 80486 with VGA and an 80286 laptop with CGA graphics. On both systems it performed well . The printer used in the tests was an Epson LQ850.

PLT is distributed as two 360K floppy disks and was very fast and easy to install. Installation basically consisted of copying the plt5.* files from the distribution disk to the hard drive and then copying the proper font file for the printer and renaming it as plt5.fnt. The program detects the graphics type and loads the proper drivers. If a mouse is present, the program detects this and allows it to be used. Further customization can be done from within the program. One particularly nice feature is that the aspect ratio can be adjusted so that what you see on the screen is truly what you get on paper.

The program comes with a well written 250 page spiral-bound manual, including a very good 34 page tutorial that gets you off to a good start. The manual also contains many examples of drawings produced by the program so that the new user quickly sees what can be done with the program. There is a fairly complete on-line help facility, but it is necesary to keep the manual handy, especially when you are first learning to use the

program. This program is oriented toward the use of the keyboard so the use of the mouse is truly optional. The

main screen has 14 pull-down menus across the top and an additional 12 along the left side. This large number of menus is very useful once you have learned how to use the program, but can be a bit intimidating and confusing to the new user. Overall, the program is relatively easy to learn to use but it is not as easy nor as intuitive to learn as other structure drawing programs such as ChemDraw or ChemText. It is faster to learn and easier to use than WlMP. PLT is a full-featured structure drawing program with a great number of options. One very useful option is the hidden line option that helps create the illusion of three-dimensional structures in bicyclic systems. The user has almost complete control of how bonds are drawn. Thus you control the orientation of double bonds (which side of the original single bond gets the second line) and the relative length of the second bond. Bonds can be drawn with any of the standard stereochemical notations (wedge, dashed, dotted, wiggly, hatched, etc.). The angle at which bonds are drawn is also under the control of the user.

Another notable option is that you can specify the orientation for text. That is to say, text can be printed at any angle with respect to the structure, even upside down. Text height is specified in mm and can be almost any size you wish. Text can be in italics or boldface. Greek characters and special mathematical symbols are also

available.

524 SOFTWARE REVIEWS

A structure can be easily modified. Among other possibilities, it can be moved around the page; rotated in either direction; stretched or squashed along either the horizontal or the vertical axis; shrunk, expanded; or it can be reflected into the mirror image.

PLT comes with an extensive set of structure templates which can be used in generating more complex structures. There are also templates for p, sp 3 and d orbital representations as well as a number of geometric solids. The program allows you to generate additional templates.

On the whole, PLT is a very useful program and does a good job of generating chemical structures and other diagrams. Although it does take a while to learn how to use the program effectively, it is time well spent. The low price of this program compared to its comptitors makes it especially attractive.

Prof. Gary Anderson Marshall University Huntington, WV 25701 Received 5 February 1991

ChemWords 1.1, Scientific Software, 17 Country Squire Ct., St. Louis, MO 63146, USA. (314) 993-8586 Suggested retail price: $50.

ChemWords is an extremely useful add-on dictionary for Microsoft Word. It provides the correct spelling for approximately 30,000 words in all areas of Chemistry and related fields. To be able to use this dictionary, it is necessary to have Microsoft Word running on a Macintosh that has a hard drive. There are no other special requirements.

Installation is very fast and easy. The manual is well written and concise but it is not really needed to be able to install and use the program. The manual does show exactly what you would see on the screen at certain stages. The manual has a minor error in the installation procedure, but it would not cause even a novice user to have any problems. (The manual instructs you to open a file from the Edit menu instead of the File menu.)

Once the ChemWords dictionary is installed, the user doesn't need to do anything else to use this package. Simply using the Word spelling checker will cause this dictionary to be searched along with the standard dictionary and any others you may have.

The dictionary was installed and was then used to check several multi-page documents. Only a very few technical terms were found that were not in the dictionary and in most cases the failure was due to the fact that the term was followed by a footnote number. Thus the "failure" to find these terms is a limitation of Microsoft Word's spelling checker and not of the ChemWords dictionary.

The dictionary contains a large number of proper names as well as the more usual technical terms. These include the names of many prominent chemists, a number of chemical companies, and a vast array of trade names and acronyms. The dictionary also includes several terms frequently found in experimental sections of papers (e.g., 100-1VlHz). A large number of compound names are also included. The large number of these types of entries makes it very unlikely that a manuscript will have very many terms that are not in the dictionary. ,~,

After a diligent search, it was possible to find terms that weren't included in the dictionary. For example, "nucleophilicity" is included but "nucleophilicities" is not. The is one of the very few missing terms and is certainly not a significant drawback to the dictionary.

On the whole this is an excellent package and would be very useful to anyone generating Chemistry related manuscripts using Microsoft Word on the Macintosh. Since it has a reasonable price ($50.00 per copy) and performs a very useful task, it is highly recommended for anyone who uses Microsoft Word for preparing manuscripts in Chemistry or related fields.

Prof. Gary Anderson Marshall University Huntington, WV 25701 Received 29 July 1991