I don't recall the Babel molecular structure file format conversion utility referred to recently - might be a good time to remind folk that it may be obtained from: http://mercury.aichem.arizona.edu/babel.html - and while we are on the subject, I wrote to Arizona recently about an ambiguity over Cambridge cssr files. This format is used by Desk Top Molecular Modeler for PC, but it chooses to allow the atom 'label' (usually an integer) (columns 7-10) to be seperated by a space from its atom (symbol), so long as it is in its correct column. BABEL, by contrast, seems to interpret the label as the x-coordinate when it occurs. I suspect that BABEL is going on columns encountered rather than on the old-fashioned (and horrible) rigid FORTRAN-type format? It is not particularly difficult to edit the DTMM file into BABEL compliance, just a nuisance to do it every time! I recommend the DOS technical editor Tech-Edit 2.61 which processes or removes columns with dexterity. I also have a DOS based molecular coordinate/structure constructor/viewer utility, xcart with xtick - see http://www.soton.ac.uk/~trg/acad/xcart.html (Requires chime to view). I don't recommend this as user-friendly, but it can be useful for smallish difficult molecules particularly in inorganic chemistry and it outputs pdb files, one of the main chemical mime specified formats. It can also be used to add connectivity information to any raw list of atom coordinates (up to 255 atoms). I have used a development of the package (not yet online) for the production of raytraced vibrational animations, as used to generate the animated gifs on my home page. Trevor Gilson chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)