Monday 18 July 2016

Your SD file will never be the same again...with ASCII depiction

A recent blog post showed how to depict a record in an SD file from within Vim. This of course is no help to those readers who have yet to successfully exit from a Vim session. But what if there was no need to create an ASCII depiction...because it was already there?

Yes, that's right, you have no clue what I'm talking about. What I'm saying is, why not bung in an ASCII depiction of the molecule in a property field? Well, apart from it being a bonkers idea that'll bloat the SD file to hitherto unimagined sizes (but think of the improved compression!), I can't think of any reason not to do this. It is my belief that this could finally unleash the untapped potential of ASCII depiction. And so I've added an option to the SD file writer in Open Babel to do exactly this.

John is fond of quoting Jurassic Park's "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." I don't know why I just mentioned that.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

What was that you said last time about feature creep? :)