ACD/ChemSketch

What's New

Version 11.0 to 12.0

• ACD/Dictionary expanded to over 30,000 well-known structures, with over 165,000 corresponding chemical names and registry numbers
• The background color, buttons, and other graphic controls can be made to conform to the Windows setting, the classic ACD/Labs view, or you can create your own theme and preference
• Resize and Rotate tools for manipulating images and structure objects are simplified; making them similar to those used by Microsoft Word, ChemDraw, and many other applications
• Copy all generated tautomers in one click
• New InChI Options proposed by IUPAC were implemented, including:
  • Mobile Hydrogen Perception (taking tautomerism into account)
  • Excluded bonds to metal
  • Absolute stereoconfiguration
  • Taking into account narrow ends of stereobonds only
• The SMILE or InChI for zero valent metals has been corrected to prevent the addition of non-explicit hydrogens

Download a PDF copy of the expanded details on What's New with ACD/ChemSketch, or contact your Account Manager or Distributor.

Version 10.0 to 11.0

The key enhancements added for ACD/ChemSketch version 11 are:

Interface Changes

• Several shortcuts for menu commands have been changed to meet Microsoft Windows standards. Some of these shortcuts were already in place in earlier versions, but a number of new ones now replace the old-style "F+number" shortcuts.
   
• We have also made some changes to the functionality of the toolbar buttons, in particular the New Page and Text buttons. If you are using version 11 of ACD/ChemSketch, please refer to the detailed What's New with ACD/ChemSketch Version 11 document.
   
• We have enhanced the functionality of the Zoom commands, and set up the default setting to Page Width. A new Generate InChI button has been added to the top toolbar.
   
• All journal styles for the American Chemical Society (ACS) and Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) journals have been combined into two corresponding styles—ACS Style and RSC Style—making the choice of style quicker and simpler.

Improvements in Structure Representation

• Most ACD/ChemSketch users will appreciate the new Antialiasing option for chemical structures
  
  
  • Antialiasing is a computer rendering technique that blurs the hard edges and adds shaded pixels to create the appearance of smoothness. This addresses the common issue with printers and computer monitors, when, due to the relatively low resolution, the tilted lines appear "stairlike" instead of smooth straight lines or curves. For example, compare the two pictures below:
    
    

    Without antialiasing:	With antialiasing:

    For different graphical applications, both images with and without antialiasing are used. The antialiasing option can be set in the General tab (from the Options menu, choose Preferences).
     
• Coordination structures: treat "regular" bonds to metal atoms as coordination bonds
  
  
  • ACD/Labs supports the usage of a special coordination bond to represent a specific bonding between a ligand and a metal center in coordination structures. Such a bond indicates a connection but does not affect the valence of the corresponding atoms. However, chemists often use the regular single bond to represent a coordination (or import structures into ChemSketch from drawing packages that do not support coordination bonds), leading to formal violation of valence rules. The new version of ACD/ChemSketch now supports the single bond indicating the coordination, without interpreting it as a valence violation.
     
• More flexibility in applying the Structure Drawing Style

Augmented Handling of Images and Files

• Improved handling of images and support of .PNG export
• Improved Insert Image dialog box
• New Open File dialog box offers "All supported chemical files" at-a-glance

IUPAC International Chemical Identifier (InChI) Improvements

• The new 1.02 beta version of InChI generation procedures has been integrated and allows users to generate new InChIKeys. This protocol, officially released by IUPAC in September 2007, includes an ability to generate InChIKey—a short, condensed 25-character long representation of the InChI string. This compact representation of InChI codes significantly expands the use of InChI encoding for structure specification and searching over the Internet.
  
  For example:
  
  
  
  

  InChI:	1/C12H14N2O/c1-12(11-13-6-7-14-11)8-9-4-2-3-5-10(9)15-| 12/h2-5H,6-8H2,1H3,(H,13,14)/t12-/m1/s1
  InChIKey:	FEGRMCYCYUYYDA-GFCCVEGCBV