A useful chemistry programs is Babel, which serves to interconvert (in probably a lossy manner) many of the chemical file formats that are in common or less common use. After several generations, Babel re-emerged as OpenBabel, and has a Web site at http://openbabel.sourceforge.net/. The current release (labelled Open Babel 1.100.1 ) has recently been recompiled to include a CML module which accepts both CML1 and CML2 as both inputs and outputs. Because the OpenBabel site itself (somewhat in the tradition of true Unix-oriented sites) does not offer precompiled binaries, we have compiled these for four platforms and offer such downloads from http://cml.sourceforge.net/new/ for MacOS X, SGI (Irix 6.5), Linux (Redhat 8) and Windows. The executables themselves only run from a command line (so dont expect a graphical interface). Thus Unix/MacOS X users will be familiar with eg babel -H (to get help on operation) and Windows/DOS users c:\path\babel.exe -H Typically the program is used as babel -i<input format> filename -o<output format> filename. For CML conversions the conventional use would be babel -i<input format> filename -ocml output.xml -x2apn (the last flag means use CML2, in array mode, with indented output and namespace prefix) Old time users should not entirely abandon the original version of babel, since this appears to support some formats (eg the Cambridge FDAT mode) which the new one does not. -- Henry Rzepa. +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK. chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)