• Single or multi-page drawings.
• Easily draw all types of organic and inorganic chemical structures.
• Place formatted text anywhere, with any baseline direction (rotated text).
• Filled and shaded orbitals, rectangles, triangles, stars, circles and arbitrary polygons can be produced.
• Insert NMR spectra; "trace" hard-copy NMR spectra to make editable electronic files.
• Produce X,Y graphs.
• Insert bitmaps (GIF, JPG, BMP).
• Export as hard copy or as BMP, WMF, EMF, GIF, EPS or HTML.
• Draw a variety of curves (solid, dashed, dotted or filled).
• Slide show mode.

Graphics Material can be produced quickly and accurately

• One-click drawing of common chemical bonds and rings.
• Lines can be drawn with the mouse or with cursor keys.
• Curves of arbitrary length (extended Bezier curves) can be easily produced. The curves can have an arrow at one end (for electron-pushing drawings) or at both ends (for indicating relationships). They can also be printed dashed or dotted (to represent delocalized charge, for example), and they can be filled.
  
• One or two-click addition of stereochemical labels, spiro or fused rings, keto, sulfoxide and sulfone groups.
• Fused, bridged and spiro chair cyclohexanes can be added easily.
• Line thickness and color can be varied.
• Drawings and text can be produced with exact dimensions, specified in mm.
• Scalable orbitals and other graphics object are easily inserted.
  

Text

• Text material can be produced in various fonts, colors, sizes or styles (bold, italic, underline, superscript, subscript).
• Text labels can positioned First (left justified), Last (right justified) or Middle (centered). They can also be positioned at the first appearance of a period, a colon, a slash or an equal sign (. : / =) for perfect alignment of columns of numbers or product ratios.
• Text can be rotated (non-horizontal baseline)
• Commonly used chemical symbols such as triple bond, degree, greek characters, arrows (reaction, equilibrium), radical anion, radical cation, double-dagger are easily inserted in labels.
• Multiline text material will automatically word-wrap according to Line Length Parameter and Line Spacing Parameter settings, so paragraphs of text can be produced.
• One-click addition of common atom labels: OH, F, Br, Cl, S, OCH₃, and others.
• New Search and replace of text in current page or all pages of a PLT document.

Multi-Page PLT Drawings

• PLT Drawings can be single-page or many pages long. Thus the slides for an entire seminar lecture, a multipage examination, all of the drawings and spectra for a long paper, or the source for an extended web page can be stored in a single PLT drawing.
• Easy navigation between pages.
• Individual pages can be printed, exported, copied, cut, moved around within the document or deleted. Entire multi-page drawings can be printed or exported as a single or a series of web pages. For an example of a web page produced directly from a > 265-page PLT drawing see the Synthesis web site.

Printing and Exporting Drawings

• PLT drawings can be printed on any Windows printer or other output device.
• Size and position of drawings on the page is fully controlled by the user.
• Windows Metafiles (WMF or EMF), bitmaps (BMP, GIF) Postscript files (EPS) can be produced for incorporation into word processing and other graphics programs.
• PLT drawings (text and graphics) can be converted into complete, ready-to-link web pages (HTML). For some examples see: Carbon-13 Chemical Shifts, Named Reagents, Electron Pushing Acid, Base.
• Multipage PLT drawings can be printed 2, 4 or 6 pages per printed page, for a compact record of a PLT document such as seminar or classroom lecture, an examination or a set of figures for a paper.

File Handling

• In addition to the normal Windows file handling dialogs, WINPLT has Open From... and Save To... options, which allow selection from a pre-defined list of drives-directories. In this way it is usually unnecessary to negotiate around complex directory structures to save and open PLT files.
• WINPLT has a File View option, which allows disk files to be viewed, and individual structures to be captured.

Drawings can be edited easily with no restrictions.

• Multiple (50-level) undo and redo.
• Single points (labels, lines, frames, NMR spectra, graphs, bitmaps) can be dragged with the mouse (Left-Drag)
• Select larger portions of a drawing to be edited using Box-Modify for rectangular areas of a drawing or Lasso Modify for arbitrary portions of a drawing.
• Individual control points of bezier curves can be dragged for easy editing of curves.
• Selected material can be copied, docked, dragged, erased, rotated, flipped, expanded, shrunk, printed, and exported as a graphic.
• The line width or color of all selected graphics lines can be changed.



• The color, size, font, style of all labels in the selected material can be changed
• All of the labels in the selected area can be aligned vertically or horizontally.
• All of the points in the selected area can be aligned vertically or horizontally.

Graphs

• Simple X, Y Graphs can be produced easily as an integral part of a PLT drawing.
• Least squares line can be drawn.
• The Graph routine will also produce graphs of functions (y = f(x), where f(x) can be defined by the user).
• A single drawing can thus include graphics material (chemical drawings), atom labels, paragraphs of text, and X Y graphs.

NMR Spectra

• NMR spectra files produced with the NMR workup programs NUTS and PCNMR4WINDOWS can be imported into PLT, and simulations or spectra produced by the NMR simulation program WINDNMR-Pro can be imported into PLT drawings through the clipboard.
• The spectra can be displayed in color and printed as a solid line, dotted line, or dashed line, in any of 5 line thicknesses.
• Multiple spectra can be stacked, and the spectra can be sized, repositioned on the page, and clipped arbitrarily (individually or in groups).


• The spectra can be integrated and section expansions can be created.
• New Peak-picking of single or multiple peaks, labeled in Hz or ppm.
• Scanned NMR spectra can be "traced" to produce vector-based NMR spectra. This allows legacy hard-copy NMR spectra to be converted to vector format and included in PLT drawings. Scan an NMR spectrum as a black and white GIF or BMP file, and load it into PLT using the Insert|Trace Bitmap NMR menu.
• A single drawing can thus include graphics material (chemical drawings), atom labels, paragraphs of text, NMR spectra, bitmap images and X Y graphs.
• All of the graphics in the papers below were created with WINPLT:
  Amine-Chelated Aryllithium Reagents - Structure and Dynamics, Reich, Goldenberg, Gudmundsson, Sanders, Kulicke, Simon, Guzei J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2001, 123, 8067-8079. PDF Suppl.
  The Regioselectivity of Addition of Organolithium Reagents to Enones: The Role of HMPA, Sikorski, Reich, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2001, 123, 6527-6535.(Article) PDF Suppl; J. Org. Chem. 1999, 64, 14. PDF

Screen Display

• One-click zooming, repositioning.
• Position and size of the screen display can be controlled by the user.
• A rectangular grid can be displayed.
• Extensive on-line and context-sensitive help.
• New PLT has a presentation mode "Slide Show" which can be used for computer presentation of a chemical lecture (a la Power Point). Thus drawing, editing and presenting a talk can be done entirely within PLT - no more copying, cutting, pasting, re-positioning and reimporting graphics when the presentation program is separate from the drawing program. For example, this web page was created from a PLT drawing, the same PLT drawing was also used for the seminar presentation using the slide show feature of PLT.

Preferences/Options

• PLT allows easy customization of many adjustable parameters (e.g., line widths, double and triple bond separation, wedge bond width, hatch bond line separation, export types, color schemes, super/subscript size, screen scales, print scales and arrowhead size).
• A list of commonly used folders (directories) can be set up to allow easy navigation on your hard drive.