Sunday 24 July 2011

Depict a chemical structure...without graphics Part II

In an earlier post, I showed how PNGs depicting 2D molecular structures could be viewed in a text terminal. This can be useful when you're logged into a remote server and don't have access to a graphical viewer.

Just for fun, I've thrown together an ASCII depiction format for Open Babel that uses aalib. But this time, rather than create a PNG depiction and then convert that to ASCII, this "Painter" (in the language of the Open Babel API) draws the structure directly onto an ASCII canvas. This should lead to better resolution, although I haven't done a proper head-to-head comparison. Here's how it looks in action (compare to the images in my earlier post):
Note that I haven't checked this code into SVN, and I'm not sure I will. For my own reference, I've stored some of the relevant files at this link (diff against r4530). Includes code taken from aa-helper.

1 comment:

Karol said...

I think this should go in the official version... another reason not to start the X server when working :)