Art Objects and Styling

Art objects and styling

This page covers the editable non-molecular objects used to annotate, organize, and visually emphasize a ChemDraft page.

An art object is a real page object—rather than an uneditable background image—and can be selected, transformed, saved, and exported. Appearance changes do not change molecular identity: changing a colour, font, stroke, or fill does not alter atoms, bonds, charge, or stereochemistry.

What you can draw

The art tools provide circles, ellipses, rectangles, rounded rectangles, straight, dashed, wavy, and bold lines, a pen, polylines, pencil and brush strokes, arcs, arrows, brackets, text, and orbital shapes. Drag to set the extent of a shape or line. Select an existing object to move, resize, rotate, or refine it.

Shapes can have an outline, solid fill, gloss treatment, dashed outline, or shadow. Lines and paths can be straight, wavy, curved, freehand, or Bézier-based. An arrow can carry an open, filled, half-arrow, bar, dot, diamond, or chevron end marker where that choice applies.

Use ordinary art arrows for layout and reaction notation; use the dedicated anchored tools for electron-pushing mechanisms. See Arrows and Mechanisms for that distinction.

Making a figure legible

Start with the chemical objects, then use art objects sparingly to establish reading order:

1. Add a text title or short caption only where it adds information.
2. Draw a line, arrow, bracket, or pale shape behind the objects it relates.
3. Use colour and heavier strokes to call out one defined feature, not every feature.
4. Check that labels remain readable at the size you expect to export.

Page object order is stacking order: objects earlier in the page’s object list are drawn underneath later ones. A filled panel should therefore sit behind the molecule it highlights. Select the panel, not the molecule, when you need to revise its colour or border.

Colour, fills, and effects

The selection-aware style controls include colour, fill, stroke width, dash, corners, and arrowhead controls as appropriate to the selected object. Shapes may use solid, linear-gradient, or radial-gradient paint. Graphics and molecules can also carry visual effects such as shadow, glow, and sketch.

The sketch effect creates deliberately uneven strokes for an informal hand-drawn look. It is a visual treatment, not a different molecular representation. Always inspect the exported figure, especially when a label crosses a coloured region or when a subtle effect will be reproduced in print.

One current limit matters when styling a scheme: the Art inspector’s colour controls and object settings operate on graphics and molecules, but not on a selected bracket or mechanism arrow. Those objects remain editable and exportable; their inspector styling surface is still narrower than the graphics surface.

Grouping and positioning

Group a molecule with the caption, panel, and annotations that should travel with it. A group can then be selected and transformed as one unit. This is particularly helpful before using Compound Layouts, which recognizes groups as a single arrangement item.

Avoid using a large opaque art object to cover chemistry. If an annotation must obscure part of a drawing, reconsider the layout first; an editable diagram is most useful when the chemistry stays visible and selectable.

Next

• Publication Figures and Style Presets
• Compound Layouts
• Documents, Pages, and Tabs