chemmacros development

Regardless how the discussion on modular chemmacros is going to end chemmacros eventually will be upgraded to v5.0. And there are going to be some changes:

• The package will have no package options any more. All setup will done through the [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\chemsetup[/cce] command. I am aware that this will hit some users. On the other hand package options don’t make much sense for chemmacros: even now the package has a lot more options which already can only be set via [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\chemsetup[/cce] so chance are people are using it already. Plus: package options can be a problem – ever had an [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]option clash[/cce]?
• Some options will be dropped.
  • For instance the [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]xspace[/cce] option will no longer be provided and no macro will get an [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\xspace[/cce] any more. This will probably the most annoying change for some users. If can give me good reasons for keeping this option let me know. In my eyes it only leads to inconsistent macro behaviour. Without it you know how macros act: the eat following spaces. With [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\xspace[/cce] you can’t be sure any more…
  • The [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]german[/cce] option will no longer be provided. The [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]language[/cce] option suffices. At the moment the option is nothing more than an alias for [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]language=german[/cce]. I’d either should provide aliases for all the other languages. it’s easier just to drop [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]german[/cce].
  • The [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]ghsystem[/cce] will be dropped. The option does nothing else than [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\usepackage{ghsystem}[/cce] so there is no real advantage in having it.
  • The option [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]Nu[/cce] will be dropped. The option only affected the macro [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\Nu[/cce] because some clash with [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]mathspec[/cce]. Now the macro will be called [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\Nuc[/cce].
  • The option [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]synchronize[/cce] will be dropped. It doesn’t make sense, really. Every place in chemmacros where atoms are typeset chemformula’s macros are used, anyway. So chemmacros and chemformula are synchronized. Everything else doesn’t make sense.
  • The option [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]greek[/cce] will be dropped changed in favor of another even more comfortable mechanism (thanks to changes in chemgreek inspired by requests by Martin Hensel.
• A few commands will change their syntax. This mainly concerns macros for defining stuff so no document content should break because of this once the preamble is updated accordingly. [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\NewChemReaction[/cce] will change its syntax or rather its options.
• This will probably annoy people, I’m afraid: a number of options will change, mostly because they’ll belong to new module names. I’ll try to keep this to an minimum but in order to be able to make chemmacros extensible with modules/libraries I need to do some re-ordering.
• I’m not sure about this: I’d like to drop the [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\listofreactions[/cce] functionality. Has this ever been used by anyone? Is it really useful? Please comment below what you think about this.
• chemmacros will provide a [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]scheme[/cce] float, hopefully flexible enough for the different classes and packages that handle floats.
• A new [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\isotope[/cce] macro that will automatically fetch the atomic number and the most common nucleon number for a given element symbol and typeset the isotope. So [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\isotope{C}[/cce] should give [latex]\ch{^{12}6C}[/latex], [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\isotope{14,C}[/cce] should give [latex]\ch{^{14}6C}[/latex], a starred variant [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]\isotope*[/cce] should omit the atomic number. This is not implemented, yet, so let’s hope for the best. 🙂
• There’ll be a macro [cci_latex]\NewChemIUPACShorthand[/cci_latex] which makes it possible to add other shorthands like [cci_latex]|[/cci_latex] or [cci_latex]^[/cci_latex] for usage in [cci_latex]\iupac[/cci_latex]. There’ll also be the corresponding [cci_latex]\Renew…[/cci_latex] and [cci_latex]\Declare…[/cci_latex] versions for changing the existing definitions. Finally there’ll also be a [cci_latex]\RemoveChemIUPACShorthand[/cci_latex] for deleting existing shorthands.

Now it’s your turn: what would you like to be improved or changed in chemmacros? What would you like to see as additional features?

PS: as a side effect of chemmacros’ development internal changes in chemformula and bohr will happen and a new package elements will be published. There is something to wait for this summer! 🙂