Organic Fonts. Including Aliphatic Font, Ring Font, and Organic Font

This program is designed for a Macintosh 512 or larger, and it works very well with the Macintosh Plus on which I tested it. It will not work on the 128K MacIntosh. Directions are also included for using it with the 400K drive of the Mac 512, but with a little extra bother. The program provides three sets of fonts: AliphaticFont, OrganicFont, and RingFont. In addition, a set of templates called DrawRings is provided for use in MacDraw, MacDraft, CricketDraw, and so on. These templates must be assembled into final structures by graphic manipulations suitable for the program with which they are used. OrganicFont works with MacPaint, Microsoft Word, or MacWrite and permits construction of complex compounds, including pentagonal and hexagonal aromatic structures directly from the keyboard. RingFont and AliphaticFont work only on graphics programs such as MacPaint or MacDraw and may appeal to users who prefer to work directly from the graphic mode. According to the documentation, RingFont gives especially good reproduction with laserwriters. In MacPaint, the separate components of structures can be manipulated by the usual tools, providing great flexibility. In MacWrite or Word, structures cannot be manipulated, but simple structures can be presented by sequences of key combinations described in the manual and in a separate tutorial. It is possible to paste MacPaint constructions into MacWrite manuscripts, but only if both MacWrite and MacPaint are on the same disk. The program permits presentation of structures in outline form, indicating the stereoconfiguration of bonds, or in stick-and-ball conformation. Boat and chair diagrams are also possible. Like any new system, it takes some time to become familiar with the techniques involved. I needed about ten minutes to construct the cortisol molecule, but most of the time was used in manipulating side chains into position. The central aromatic structure could be established within less than a minute. When the end result was printed on an Imagewriter dot-matrix printer, it was entirely satisfactory for a report or for teaching slides. Examples in the documentation of printouts with a laserwriter show a quality suitable for submission for publication. The program, therefore, would permit a scientist to eliminate the need for the services of an expensive artist. The fact that the documentation lists the graphic equivalent of the keyboard in alphabetical order bothers me a bit. It would be much simpler if the keys were listed in the usual QWERTYUIOP system. But, on the whole, this set of fonts seems a useful tool for the chemist who has access to a MacIntosh and who uses formula diagrams for teaching or publication.