The visualisation of chemical processes for electronic publishing and presentations

Over the past ten years, there has been a huge increase in desktop computer power, leading to explosive growth of the internet and the now widespread use of electronic media for publication and presentation of scientific documents. These new innovations have provided a challenge, as well as great opportunity, for a visual subject such as chemistry to present itself in a much more appealing way than has previously been possible. This article attempts to demonstrate how easy it is to create visually impressive chemical images and animations, as well as interactive structures and spectra, for use in lectures, on-line courses, electronic journal articles, web pages, etc. This is intended to be an introductory article to show potential authors how easy it is to add valuable extra content to their scientific documents, and at the same time make them more visually attractive. Topics covered include: animated gif images, creating and displaying interactive 3D molecular structures, creating 3D structure animations, creating and displaying molecular orbitals, and interactive spectra.