General Guidelines

Guide to Produce and to Use or Evaluate Electronically Transmitted Data and Reports
With Links to Tools, Explanations, and to Examples


This overview page mentions only a few often used tools and formats; more and detailed informations, also about present limitations are available below together with many links and some typical examples at the separate sections 1 to 9.

These guidelines refer mainly to often used tools and sites in chemistry, without claiming to be complete. Although most of such tools and sites were tested their performance is of course beyond our responsiblity. Tools and applications for electronic communication are in particularly fast development, for which reason corresponding informations can become rapidly obsolete. Nevertheless, after you discover the almost unlimited possibilities of electronic communication techniques you will have little problems to follow up new developments.

In order to install the tools (plugins) or check the sites just push the colormarked links. (Some published html or xml documents already make use of java applets, in which case one does not need to download plugins).


  1. Why and where to use electronic tools -avoiding loss of valuable data
    submitting, reviewing, editing, reading/analyzing reports selected journals and platforms


  2. Numerical material (tables, text, etc., see also section 7 )
    data should be available longterm: use ASCI formats (*.txt, or HTML, CML, XML etc); WORD files etc. can be added but may be not readable years from now


  3. 2D/3D formulas
    e.g. with ChemDraw (CDW), ISISdraw, etc.


  4. 3D structures (3-D coordinates, "hypermolecules")
    formats e.g. *.pdb; *.ent (PDB), *.cif, *.mol
    CHIME, Rasmol, ORTEP III, WebLabViewer etc.


  5. Spectra
    formats: JCAMP, JPEG
    NMR e.g. MestRe-C, WinNMR, ACD/SpecViewer etc.


  6. Animations of e.g. reaction sequences
    from MO, FF, MD calculations etc.
    format: mpeg, avi, etc.


  7. Measured data e.g. equilibria, kinetics
    e.g. with ORIGIN, SIGMAPLOT, SpecFit, EXCEL, Hyperquad


  8. View files / images
    formats: e.g. GIF, TIFF, JPEG


  9. Interactive images
    e.g. material surfaces from supermicroscopy
    blaxxun, Cortona, CosmoPlayer, etc.



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