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Creation and application of design schemes

Klaus Brandenburg -- 4 December 2012, 10:30 GMT

Make your structure picture settings (a rendered colorful screen plot or an ORTEP-like ellipsoid sketch on white paper) along with the designs of atom (groups, sites), bonds, polyhedra, etc. -- and simply call "Create Design Scheme" to create a design scheme from these current picture settings and save it under a title, so you can access this scheme whenever you later want to quickly re-design a picture from another structure.

Application of a design scheme
The following example shows how to quickly re-design a rendered color picture to a flat color-line ellipsoid sketch on a white A4 page. After loading "1004001.cif" (which is Crystallography Open Database (COD) entry #1004001, Tungsten sulfide cluster with tri-n- (octakis(mu!3sulfido)-hexakis(tri-n-butylphosphine) -hexa-tungsten) by Jin, Song.; Zhou, Ran.; Scheuer, Ellen. M.; Adamchuk, Jennifer.; Rayburn, Lori. L.; DiSalvo, Francis. J.). The default or current setting is "window layout", "ball-and-stick model" and "rendered".

Screenshot of loading COD:1004001 with picture design default settings

Application of a design scheme that has been created previously titled "Ellipsoid plot, colored" will now be applied to the structure picture of COD:1004001...

Design scheme settings dialog

...leading to the following page layout with white background and rather flat ellipsoid line sketches:

Screenshot of COD:1004001 after application of design scheme

When using the "Auto Picture Creator", the simplest way is to choose the design scheme from the "Scheme" combobox in the "Picture design" section of the Auto Picture Creator. Other ways -- if you prefer manual changes at your structure picture -- is to choose the appropriate design scheme from the "Design Schemes" sub-menu in the "Picture" menu. When running "Apply Design Scheme" from a "Design Scheme" dialog, you have additional choices which fields of the scheme to apply, e.g. just the atom and bond desings but leaving rendering options and background color settings unchanged.

Two ways of creating a design scheme
(1) Make your preferred picture design settings manually by using several commands from the "Picture" menu, typically "Model", "Atom Designs", "Picture Settings", etc. Then run "Create Design Scheme" from the "Design Schemes" sub-menu of the "Picture" menu. In the dialog (see example above), you may choose which fields of the scheme to be relevant. (In the above example: all fields including picture viewing settings.) Give your scheme a title and save it.

(2) Use the "Auto Picture Creator" to approach your preferred design by changing settings for "Layout", "Model etc.", and "Format" in the "Picture design" category, and then run "Create Design Scheme" dialog like described under (1).

The Design Scheme Manage allows you to maintain, add, edit or delete design schemes whereever later.

Related articles

Design schemes: Creating atom color, style and radii resources -- 13 December 2012, 14:00 GMT
The most convenient way to create a design scheme is from an existing structure picture. This article shows you how to derive a set of resources for atom main colors, atom styles, and radii. More...

About picture building and design schemes -- 28 November 2012, 11:00 GMT
A picture building scheme is a batch of functions to build up a structure picture. And a design scheme is its pendant referring to the picture's design and viewing properties -- somewhat like a style sheet in a word processing application for example. This article shows the application of building and design schemes to series of structure files, which significantly speeds up processing of crystal structures compared to the use of the manual functions from the "Build" and other menus. More...

The "Auto Picture Creator" -- 27 November 2012, 23:30 GMT
The new "Auto Picture Creator" window is usually docked at the left side of the Diamond application window and offers the most useful features in the categories picture building, design and viewing at a glance. Read about the automatic reflection of changes of picture building settings in the "Auto Picture Creator" docking pane with the structure picture -- and in parts also vice versa. More...