ChemDraw 8.0 Forum

no regressions since 4.1.0. still annoying that you can't just copy and paste into OpenOffice, but i'm sure that that's an issue with OOo's lousy handling of embedded objects, and not chemdraw. still haven't tried installing Office XP under Crossover, but would be very nice if Chemdraw and Office XP would play nice like they do under Windows!

Thanks for the update; that's really helpful.

Is it text you can't cut and paste? I find that surprising. Might
be worth trying it with something like Mozilla or gedit;
I cut and paste text and pictures between cxoffice apps
and simple Linux apps like that all the time.

Now if it's a complex object, then it's harder...

Cheers,

Jeremy

Text copies and pastes fine. The chemical structures, however, don't. I've taken to just saving the .cdx Chemdraw layout files as images (.png or .gif) and then inserting as images under OOo. Not the best solution as images don't scale as nicely as the native objects, and editing the figure requires opening ChemDraw and resaving.
I would really appreciate a right-click menu option in ChemDraw for "copy selected as image" to make the process easier, but I'm just happy that I can run it at all under Linux.

To elaborate on your question, when one selects a graphic in ChemDraw and uses the right click menu to copy it, the format is apparently Microsoft Imaging Document format (.mdi) which is based on .tiff. I thought that OpenOffice could handle .tiff, but it doesn't seem to work as yet. I'm using the OOo binaries, so I might benefit from compiling from source and including .tiff support, but that's a loooong painful compile. Do you know if .mdi contains extensions that are incompatible with the .tiff libraries available for linux?
In the case of actually embedding ChemDraw objects inside of word processing documents, I've found that even on a fast, up-to-date windows machine, embedding ChemDraw objects into Word documents often leads to file corruption and lots of headaches. I avoid the problem by inserting as images the files (.png or .tiff) that I "save as" in ChemDraw. For those of you about to murder your computer because your 150 page thesis keeps crashing with ChemDraw errors, stick with images. I know it's more burdensome than embedding the object and being able to edit it just by double clicking, but you'll save yourself a world of hurt going with images.

-Tom