Wikipedia:WikiProject Chemistry/Structure drawing workgroup

The chemists on Wikipedia need to agree on appropriate settings for presenting chemical structures and reactions. The purpose of this workgroup is to discuss the various issues and come to a consensus on each one. Our decisions will then be uploaded to the structure drawing page and will also be briefly described in the style guide. Please leave comments on the workgroup talk page.

Activities

 * Basic 2D structure drawing has been discussed, and the group has come to a consensus on how this should be done.

Issues

 * 1) Not all contributors have access to ChemDraw, so settings for a variety of software will need to be defined.
 * 2) If at all possible, we should try to agree on settings that are widely available (e.g., the standard ACS settings should probably be at least one option, though also see the points below).
 * 3) Different situations call for different styles, perhaps even within the same article.  We have inorganics, complexes, organometallics and organics.  We have simple organics, and complex natural products, and huge proteins and DNA.
 * 4) We are not a paper journal, so we do not need to worry so much about keeping drawings small, but we do want to keep our drawings fairly compact and also attractive.  We do have to consider the fact that our drawings may be viewed at several different sizes, this affects what font size we use for atoms, etc.
 * 5) We need to discuss a variety of drawing types- simple flat drawings, 3D structures and (for the future) Jmol.  This workgroup might serve as a liaison with the people writing the wiki software to ensure good compliance.
 * 6) We need to integrate our drawings with other chemical compound descriptions such as CAS registry number and InChI.  We need to set up ways for structures to include metadata so they have information about the compound included.
 * 7) We need to consider smarter ways to present
 * 8) If this group develops into a permanent body of people, a long term goal might be to develop a system for structure searching and substructure searching.  However, that is not an issue that can be addressed at this time (April 2006).