Converting Mac Chemdraw images to PC gif images. How?

[jsb2 at camsci.com]

>At Bristol, we have the unfortunate situation of the Organic and
>Inorganic Depts using Macs, while we in Physical Chemistry (including
>me, the webmaster), use PCs and UNIX.  So when I have to create web
>pages for staff members in org/inorg chemistry, I keep on running into
>the problems of (a) converting their Mac files to PC-readable ones, and
>(b) converting their Mac Chemdraw diagrams into gif files.
>
>The text is just about do-able, but I'm having real problems converting
>the Chemdraw files.  The best I've come up with is to get the author to
>print out a good quality hard copy, and I scan it in using Windows >formatting.

Ick!  ChemDraw files are binary-compatible (i.e. completely compatible)
on all three platforms.  Make sure that it has a .chm filename extension
and a ChemDraw file created on the Mac should be directly readable into
the Windows or UNIX versions of ChemDraw.

For conversion to GIF on the Macintosh side, we generally recommend
using the freeware clip2gif application.  It does a really nice job.
Also, recent versions of ChemDraw (3.5 or later, I think) include an
AppleScript that allows you to create a "Save As GIF..." menu item.
We use clip2gif for on-the-fly GIF creation at
http://chemfinder.camsoft.com and we have also in the past used it
for batch translation of files.  A really nice little program.  Supports
JPEG and TIFF, too.

The options for GIF creation on Windows are significantly more limited.

Jonathan Brecher
CambridgeSoft Corporation
jsb at camsoft.com

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