Personal Experience with Four Kinds of Chemical Structure Drawing Software: Review on ChemDraw, ChemWindow, ISIS/Draw, and ChemSketch

Chemical structure drawing software is specialized in the chemical structural information with regards to processing, storing, rendering, and editing. With the advent of bioinformatics and chemoinformatics explosion, professional chemical informatics software for personal computers developed rapidly. For the complexity and specialty of chemical information, to use general-purpose drawing software in chemical structure drawing was painstaking and inefficient. The result was unsatisfactory even in the case of simple molecular drawings. The expression of three-dimensional molecular structure and the conversion of molecular structure from two-dimensional to three-dimensional (2D to 3D) were unfeasible by common graphic software. More than a dozen years ago, chemical professionals made use of ink-pen and chemical stencil sets to prepare papers or presentations. Freehand chemical drawing was not uncommon in professional publications. Nowadays, people in chemistry get use to a variety of chemical drawing software in dozens-megabits size. The slim and compact software for chemical drawing of the DOS time seems to be a remote memory. If it was a rarity in the DOS time, the chemical drawing software is commonplace now. Chemists use it everyday. There are more than a dozen popular chemical drawing software,1 such as ChemDraw, ChemWindow, ChemPen, C-Design, ChemFrontier, DrawMol, and MolDraw, which belong to standalone ones, and ISIS/Draw, ChemSketch, and Chemistry 4-D Draw, which work as interfacial software or add-ins. Interfacial software is usually a member of a suite and could be used independently. Powerful standalone software such as ChemDraw and ChemWindow are members of commercial suites. This article is based on the authors’ experiences with ChemDraw, ChemWindow, ISIS/Draw, and ChemSketch; the current version of ours is 5.0 Ultra, 6.0, 2.5, and 5.12, respectively.