Document drawing styles

Implementation notes and historical checks. Open the visual guide →.

Click the style selector in the status bar, left of View, to switch directly between journal presets. Choose Manage styles… at the bottom of that menu, or Properties → Edit drawing style…, to open the detailed editor. New documents always start with JACS / ACS. Changing one document does not change the defaults for another.

Choose JACS / ACS, Nature, RSC, Angewandte, or SYNLETT / SYNTHESIS. Each journal choice follows publisher instructions or an official download and has a Publisher instructions ↗ link in the panel. See journal settings and publisher sources.

Direct journal selection applies the preset immediately, scales existing geometry with its bond length, and updates matching fonts and strokes in one Undo step. Manage styles… opens the editor with the current settings; customized settings display as Custom in the selector.

The editor keeps the current draft’s dimensions so you can edit and export a reusable style. The panel previews a sample structure while the document stays unchanged. The bottom Save icon applies the draft to the drawing in one Undo step; ‹ Properties leaves it unapplied. The fixed footer keeps Import, Export, and Save icons visible while settings scroll.

Settings

The main controls set the label font, label size, nominal bond length, and line width. Advanced stroke settings exposes bold/wedge width, label clearance, hash spacing, and multiple-bond spacing as a percentage of nominal bond length. Physical dimensions are independent of screen zoom. PNG file export uses up to 1200 dpi, reducing resolution for large drawings while retaining physical size.

Center chain double bonds draws automatic double bonds outside rings with two strokes centered on the bond axis. It is off by default: substituted chain doubles then offset toward an attached ring or, when no attached ring selects a side, the side with more substituent bonds, including unlabeled terminal =CH₂. Equal counts use the stored bond direction as described in bond tools; terminal heteroatom doubles such as C=O remain centered. Apply changes the setting in the document in one Undo step. Ring double bonds and individually chosen double-bond placements retain their own placement rules. Native documents and .reshiki-style files retain this setting; ChemDraw exchange does not map it to a document setting.

Dimension units chooses points (pt), millimetres (mm), or centimetres (cm) for the editor’s five physical fields: bond length, line width, bold width, label margin, and hash spacing. A bare number uses the unit shown beside the field. An explicit suffix overrides it: 0.5 cm, 5mm, and 14.173228346456693 pt describe the same bond length. Use a decimal point, with no grouping separators; scientific notation and spaces before the suffix are accepted. Label size always uses points (a bare number or pt suffix), and bond spacing remains a percentage. Other tools retain their labeled units.

The preferred unit is remembered across editor sessions and application restarts. Changing it reformats the draft without resizing or dirtying the drawing, changing a preset, or adding an Undo step. Stored styles and drawings continue to use points; old files retain their physical size. The editor preserves exact values while switching units rather than repeatedly converting rounded display text.

Typing updates only the sample preview when the complete draft is valid. Enter validates and formats the current field; it does not apply the draft to the drawing. Moving focus leaves typed text intact. Unfinished entries such as 1e, 5., or 5 m, unsupported units, and invalid ranges prevent Save and Export. Finish an invalid dimension before changing its displayed unit. Escape or ‹ Properties discards the draft; a chosen unit preference remains. Drafts in other tabs adopt the preference when revisited, except an unfinished dimension keeps its original unit labels and text until corrected and committed with Enter.

Atom labels without individual font overrides inherit the document style. Update matching text and strokes also updates existing captions, atom font overrides, arrows, and graphics whose settings match the old style. Different font families, sizes, and line widths remain unchanged. Colors, bold/italic formatting, and chemical connectivity are retained.

Scale layout with bond length is off by default. With it off, existing positions stay fixed and the new bond length is used for subsequent drawing. With it on, object geometry scales around the drawing center by the ratio of new to old nominal bond length. This includes molecular coordinates, annotation positions, arrow paths, and graphic geometry. Paper dimensions and margins stay fixed; explicit text sizes and line widths follow the separate matching-settings option. This is a proportional layout change, not molecular cleanup.

Reuse a style

Save style… saves the panel settings as a .reshiki-style file without changing the drawing. Load… opens a saved style into the preview; Apply is still required. A style file contains settings only, not molecules or page contents. Native style files are validated before use and limited to 64 KB. Load… also accepts ChemDraw .cds, .cdx and .cdxml files up to 16 MB, including older journal stationery. It extracts the document label font and bond dimensions; artwork, page layout, colors and separate caption settings are not imported.

Journal settings and publisher sources explain the five publisher-based choices and compare their actual drawings in ReShiki and ChemDraw. Complete stationery documents combining page layouts, objects, and styles are not imported by this panel.

Persistence and exchange

Native document format 14 and later store drawing settings. Supported older documents open with JACS / ACS defaults. Cleanup, aromatic display changes, copy selection, recovery, and Undo/Redo retain the document style. Assistant previews use the current style.

SVG, PDF, and PNG use the same styled scene as the canvas. Supported CDXML/CDX document-level fonts and bond dimensions are written and read in physical units. Import preserves the declared physical size instead of normalizing every molecule to 14.4 pt bonds. A style’s descriptive name is native metadata; editable exchange may call it Imported style. Pasting into an existing document uses the destination’s bond style while retaining supported explicit object overrides.

Imported documents can therefore be larger than before when their source declared larger bonds. That reflects their actual publication size. Journal recommendations may cover additional requirements beyond these supported drawing settings.

Verification

Regression checks cover native save/reopen, style-file validation, physical editable exchange, chemical identity, aromatic circle ownership, cleanup, explicit overrides, optional scaling, invalid-input rejection, stale drafts, default resets, and a single Apply/Undo/Redo transaction.

The interface was rendered offscreen at 1280 × 820 and 1040 × 680. Pointer events verified that Apply remains visible and clickable at both sizes. Snapshots are under the ignored artifacts/document-style-qa/ directory. These checks do not replace a full native desktop acceptance pass.

Canvas colors and interface appearance

The status bar controls left of View separate journal style, canvas color theme, and canvas brightness. The sun/moon button shows the current canvas mode; click it to switch between white and black paper. The brightness you choose is remembered for new drawings and the next launch. Opening a saved drawing keeps that drawing’s canvas brightness, and Undo/Redo changes only the drawing. These controls are also available in Page setup. They do not change bond dimensions, font sizes, or bold formatting.

The color theme offers:

Publication: neutral black labels on light paper, white labels on dark paper.
Presentation: vivid Jmol hues with 50% OKLCH lightness and 200% of Jmol chroma on light paper; 70% lightness and 100% chroma on dark paper. RGB gamut mapping and contrast checks keep the final colors usable. Carbon, hydrogen, and bonds stay neutral unless individually recolored.
Pastel: a softer, lighter version of the same Jmol hues, with label contrast maintained on light paper and gentle tints on dark paper. Carbon, hydrogen, and bonds stay neutral.
Jmol: the Jmol CPK palette, using the published element color table for H through Mt. Later elements retain neutral colors. Canvas labels adjust brightness only when necessary for a 5:1 target against the paper, including white hydrogen and yellow sulfur on light canvases.
VESTA: the element colours of VESTA (K. Momma and F. Izumi), from pymatgen’s ElementColorSchemes.yaml (MIT), for H through Mt; later elements retain neutral colors. Canvas labels adjust brightness for contrast in the same way as Jmol.

Presentation and Pastel derive their light and dark palettes from the same Jmol table, covering H through Mt. Their tiles include the corresponding neutral carbon and hydrogen shades; canvas labels keep those two elements black or white. Elements beyond the source table retain neutral colors. Selecting a theme replaces atom color overrides, including pasted atom colors, while preserving typography and geometry. You can assign individual colors afterward; choosing a theme again resets them. New atoms automatically follow the theme. Ink and palette colors follow the canvas brightness, custom colors stay exact on both canvases, and raster pictures keep their original pixels. The color button and Color box show the colors as they appear on the canvas.

The periodic table and quick atom buttons use colored tile backgrounds with regular-weight, high-contrast symbols. Jmol tiles derive their backgrounds from its published element colors; canvas label brightness adjustments do not change those tile hues. A thicker outline identifies the selected element.

Canvas colors are saved with the document and participate in Undo/Redo. File exports (PNG, SVG, PDF and ChemDraw) and printing include the canvas background and visible colors. Copies always have a transparent background: Copy Image retains the visible ink in PDF/PNG/SVG, and editable ChemDraw copies retain those object colors without adding a page rectangle. Pasting between ReShiki drawings adds no background either; Ink and palette colors take on the receiving canvas.

View → Interface controls only the surrounding interface: Match canvas, Light, or Dark. The preference is remembered between launches and never changes the drawing, document history, clipboard, or exports. There is no separate dark drawing preset.

Swatch colors come from the theme’s palette: eight named hues (Red, Orange, Amber, Green, Teal, Blue, Indigo, Purple) plus Ink, which is black on the light canvas and white on the dark one. The Strong row colors bonds, text and strokes; the Tint row colors fills and ring interiors. Each row has one OKLCH lightness per theme and canvas, so palette colors follow the theme and the canvas brightness, and moving a hue in the theme recolors every use of it. Edit hues… in the color popover moves a hue in 10° steps (click a column, then a chip; ← and → also step) with a per-hue reset and Restore default hues. Editing a built-in theme saves a copy in the drawing, such as “Publication · custom hues”. Ring tints keep white bonds at 5:1 on the dark canvas. Automatic element labels in both modes adjust perceptual lightness to target 5:1 against the paper and every associated ring fill. Explicit atom colors are preserved. A typed hex value is a custom color: it stays exact on both canvases, and the drawing keeps the last eight. Copy and paste between ReShiki drawings keeps palette colors and Ink, so pasted objects follow the receiving drawing’s theme, canvas and hues. Colors imported or pasted from ChemDraw and other sources are custom and keep their source appearance, except imported black and black pasted onto the light canvas, which become Ink. Drawings from earlier versions turn their old swatch colors into the matching palette colors and keep every other color as it appeared: earlier versions showed custom colors lightness-flipped on the dark canvas, so an older dark-canvas drawing stores the flipped colors once when it is opened, pasted or restored. Exports, the clipboard and CDX/CDXML write the colors as they appear. Copying still leaves the area outside the drawing transparent; the colored ring interior remains part of the drawing. ChemDraw discards fills hidden inside contracted abbreviations, so CDX/CDXML export and editable copies expand abbreviated groups that contain filled rings. Unfilled abbreviations remain contracted, and the original ReShiki drawing stays unchanged.

Highlight parts of a structure

Select atoms or bonds, open the style bar’s Color menu, and choose Apply to → Highlights. Choose a Tint color to place a persistent halo behind atom labels and a wide rounded underlay behind selected bonds. A bond is included when both of its atoms are selected. Use the crossed-out swatch, Clear highlights, to remove the selected highlights. Ordinary text and bond colors remain separately editable; highlighting does not change chemical identity or bond order.

Highlights stay with the atoms and bonds when moving, resizing, copying or deleting them, and Apply/Clear each form one Undo step. Coloring a contracted abbreviation paints its visible label and any unhighlighted internal atoms and bonds. Its font, size, emphasis and text color are separate from the internal atom styles, which reappear when the label is expanded. Existing internal colors are retained, including a differently colored anchor; expanding the label reveals them. Replacing a highlighted label with another chemical preset carries its label color to the new fragment. When atoms or bonds are joined, the destination keeps its highlight, or inherits the source highlight if it had none.

Palette highlights follow the drawing’s theme and canvas; custom and imported highlight colors stay exact, including black. Automatic label and bond ink adjusts for the highlight background, while manual foreground colors retain their precedence. Choosing another theme keeps the highlights and follows the existing rule of resetting manual atom ink.

Native files and ReShiki clipboard data retain editable highlights. SVG, PDF, PNG, image copies and print output use the same halo geometry; surrounding clipboard pixels remain transparent. CDXML/CDX store native atom, bond and contracted-label highlight colors independently of foreground ink. An abbreviation with only an internal anchor highlight may be expanded in an exported copy to avoid adding highlight colors to other members; the source drawing stays contracted. New saves use document format 30. Older drawings still open; ReShiki 0.13.0 and earlier reject these newer files explicitly instead of silently removing unsupported content.

The drawing-style panel’s Export icon menu offers ReShiki style (.reshiki-style) or ChemDraw CDS (.cds). Both contain label fonts and bond dimensions, without canvas theme colors, artwork or page layout. ReShiki style files preserve all supported settings exactly; CDS dimensions use ChemDraw’s binary precision. Load either through the Import icon.

Choose Manage themes… in the canvas theme dropdown to create a custom palette. Choose a Reference theme (Jmol, VESTA, a built-in, or a saved/imported theme) and adjust lightness and color intensity separately for light and dark mode while full periodic-table previews update live. Presentation and Pastel restore their Jmol-based recipes. The exact OKLCH formula appears at the bottom of the controls. It transforms label and interface-tile colors independently, retaining each reference role’s hue. Preview labels, solid Color tiles, softened Interface tiles, or labels on ring fills; click an element to inspect its RGB colors and contrast. Both backgrounds stay visible. Use the preview icons under Make it yours to switch views, and the B button at the top right to toggle bold symbols. Each table includes a live molecule preview with its NH hydrogen shown. Attached H/count text follows hydrogen’s theme color; explicit whole-label colors remain intentional overrides. The Save icon adds the result to your theme library and applies it with Undo, and the four settings and a snapshot of the reference colors are retained for later editing.

The canvas theme dropdown has one Manage themes… entry. In the manager, select a saved theme to edit or delete it, or choose New theme…. Publication, Presentation, Pastel, Jmol, and VESTA cannot be deleted; saving a built-in creates a custom copy. The top-right Import, Save, and Export icons sit beside B. Import opens a preview only: review both palettes before saving. Back to drawing leaves the draft unapplied. Deleting a library theme preserves colors embedded in existing drawings. Soft Jmol remains an optional file example, not a default menu entry. A .reshiki-theme contains both light and dark palettes; the canvas brightness button chooses between them. Exporting a theme never changes or exports the journal style, interface appearance, or individual object overrides. Themes you save are retained in your local library and embedded in saved drawings. Exporting alone does not add a theme to the library. Element-wide coloring is managed by themes; the toolbar still supports manual colors for selected atoms and other objects. Selecting a theme resets atom overrides and can be undone. Embedded custom themes were introduced in document format 16; most current saves use format 30 as described in file compatibility.

Themes accept exact sRGB byte triplets or OKLCH values. RGB is the portable output format; OKLCH is the authoring model used for hue-preserving tone changes and sRGB gamut mapping. Presentation and Pastel use separate lightness/chroma settings, with lower chroma for Pastel. Tile surfaces and regular-weight symbols use separate roles, so a pale tile does not imply pale text. Automatic labels target 5:1, with 4.5:1 as the minimum when custom backgrounds constrain the solution. Focus and selection outlines target 3.2:1. These thresholds are tested on the final RGB values, not inferred from OKLCH lightness.

Explicit colors remain exact. Properties reports atom labels that fall below 4.5:1 against the paper or associated ring fills; this check does not cover arbitrary overlapping artwork. Transparent copies retain visible ink, so readability on an unknown slide background cannot be guaranteed. Preview using the intended light or dark canvas before copying.

See the theme library contribution guide for the file format, validation command and GitHub contribution process. The color-role approach draws on Radix’s role scales and Material Color Utilities. Generation uses OKLab/OKLCH and contrast validation uses WCAG relative luminance as an engineering baseline.