Hi all! This should be helpful to all chemists, since it's not posssible to use tags in order to display molecular structures. It's a little bit complicated. For formulas, you could use 'tex' tags, and also, 'sub' and 'sup' tags. But, unfortunately, for now is not possible to display structures on forum. You could do it by uploading pictures. There is a useful chemistry graphical software, which is free and could be used for design and modeling. First is JChemPaint which is software that creates 2D chemical diagrams. JChemPaint Next two are 3D molecule viewers: JMol and Gabedit. Useful could be also Chemistry Development Kit, which is actually programming software. It's available here. I hope this would be useful for the start. Cheers!
I'm a chemistry student, and I have found this modeling/sketching software to be more than impressive. http://www.acdlabs.com/download/
ISIS DRAW: http://www.mdl.com/downloads/downloadable/index.jsp It works on windows, Mac or on Wine in linux, I find it easier then ChemDraw.
I used a few in linux but don't have much use these days but might help so will post them. www .nongnu.org/gchemutils/ garlic.mefos.hr/garlic-1.6 genchemlab.sourceforge.net/ I know there are a few other open source mol viewers / modeling tools around too. Sorry can't post proper links but post count not high enough as just joined. They are relevant so thought I would though.
Spartan I am a fan of Spartan Modeling program, but it does cost money. It is made by wavefunction, here is the link: wavefun.com Besides just making models for presentations you can get the stability of the molecule, its energy, its bond length and angles, and even simulate the changing geometric structure of a molecule with the substiution of elements. It is really great for material science.
spartan is worth the money though, but most university chem depts have it on the network somewhere. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! ALSO chemdraw is good.
Royal Society of Chemistry font: http://www.rsc.org/education/teachers/learnnet/RSCfont.htm It's got a bunch of extra symbols in it, for charges and molarity, including symbols with both super script and subscript numbers and symbols, also all the arrows you could need.
If you just want to view molecule pics and properties and want something that integrates with Windows then there is one I found recently, has a funny name "ThumbFish". Just google for "thumbfish molecules" and you will see it.
