User fd07dcb633
10-11-2016 22:58:39
Feature request: JChem4Excel has come a long way over the years. As a a former user of ISIS4Excel I have been very pleased with how much extra functionality JChem brings to the table. However, one feature of the old ISIS4Excel that JChem hasn't been able to match is the "proper" and professional scaling of structures within cells. Currently JChem allows 2 display modes:
- expand/shrink structures to fill their respective cells -- this works fine for day-to-day work, but is not acceptable for presentation since it looks amateurish to have each structure drawn on a separate scale. (e.g. put a hydrogen atom in a cell next to taxol and you'll observe that the hydrogen atom is the same size as taxol -- which isn't a professional presentation of those two structures)
- Use a pre-defined, fixed bond length (set in the options panel) -- this fixes the issue above. However, when you add or remove a structure from your worksheet the optimal bond length changes and this requires constant, manual tweaking of the display parameters in the options panel every time to add or remove a structure from your worksheet. For example, if you add a large structure to your worksheet, then the structure will overflow from the cell since the fixed bond length is too large -- you will need to manually reduce the bond length in the options to get the new structure to fit in the cell.
The solution to this (as was implemented in ISIS4Excel) is to have a display mode where all structures on a worksheet conform to a fixed bond length/font size, however those fixed parameters are dynamically selected based on the largest structure on the worksheet. Every time a structure is added, deleted, hidden or shown, the optimal bond length setting is re-calculated based on the current largest visible structure.