What is ctec?

ctec will be a program to draw chemical structure formulas that are commonplace in organic chemistry. These formulas look like this:

(This example was drawn with chemtool and touched up using Inkscape.) ctec will be written in Python and using the PyGTK widget library and is mainly intended to run on Unix systems.

Goals

The following features should be considered essential:

• The standard drawing operations for fixed angles, freehand bonds, cycles, atoms and groups, arrows, etc.
• A robust Undo mechanism.
• Loading and saving using its own format as well as some foreign ones, MOL in particular.
• Export to PNG and to vector formats so far as cairo permits.
• A user-extensible template library for commonly used molecules and groups.

Technologically, the goal is to:

• Perform smooth on-screen and export/print drawing using cairo.
• Adhere to the Gnome HIG to a reasonable extent.