Walnut

Version 0.3 beta [201509]

Advanced Rendering and Conversion of Chemical Sketch Files

NextMove Software's Walnut provides high-fidelity rendering and file format conversion of Perkin-Elmer's ChemDraw .CDX and .CDXML files. Many cheminformatics toolkits that read (and sometimes) write ChemDraw files only worry about the molecules or reactions encoded by them. Walnut, on the other hand, attempts to capture and preserve every piece of information present in the chemist's graphical depiction.

Walnut technology is portable, building upon the Cairo graphics library allowing it to run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. For example, Walnut is used internally by NextMove Software's Casandra product, for server side rendering of ELN sketches.

To demonstrate Walnut's capabilities, the following image shows the results of importing/rendering CambridgeSoft's "Human Anatomy" benchmark CDX file, available to download from the Perkin-Elmer website. Not only does NextMove's walnut come closer to the original "ChemDraw" image than ChemAxon's Marvin, ChemDoodle or BioVia's Accelrys Draw, but even improves upon ChemDraw's own SVG export [which is only available on ChemDraw for Windows].