At Bristol, we have the unfortunate situation of the Organic and Inorganic Depts using Macs, while we in Physical Chemistry (including me, the webmaster), use PCs and UNIX. So when I have to create web pages for staff members in org/inorg chemistry, I keep on running into the problems of (a) converting their Mac files to PC-readable ones, and (b) converting their Mac Chemdraw diagrams into gif files.

The text is just about do-able, but I'm having real problems converting the Chemdraw files. The best I've come up with is to get the author to print out a good quality hard copy, and I scan it in using Windows >formatting.

Ick! ChemDraw files are binary-compatible (i.e. completely compatible) on all three platforms. Make sure that it has a .chm filename extension and a ChemDraw file created on the Mac should be directly readable into the Windows or UNIX versions of ChemDraw. For conversion to GIF on the Macintosh side, we generally recommend using the freeware clip2gif application. It does a really nice job. Also, recent versions of ChemDraw (3.5 or later, I think) include an AppleScript that allows you to create a "Save As GIF..." menu item. We use clip2gif for on-the-fly GIF creation at http://chemfinder.camsoft.com and we have also in the past used it for batch translation of files. A really nice little program. Supports JPEG and TIFF, too. The options for GIF creation on Windows are significantly more limited. Jonathan Brecher CambridgeSoft Corporation jsb@camsoft.com ----- chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. Archived as: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To unsubscribe, send to listserver@ic.ac.uk the following message; unsubscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (rzepa@ic.ac.uk)