A version 4.0 of my package bundle chemmacros is coming nearer. The most notable difference will be that the chemformula package will be usable as a standalone package. This is not what I am going to ask you about. You may know that chemmacros provides some orbital pictures:
[cce lang=”latex”]\orbital{s} \orbital{p} \orbital{sp3}[/cce]
Hi!
The white part doesn’t seem to be easily visible…maybe more of a gray type?
Will coloring (blue/red, e.g.) be available?
For the “ring” of the z²: It should be more round/donut-like. Not so flat, as it has been drawn.
The first of the dx²-dy²: it should be more tilted! Meaning the black part more horizontal and more “compressed” (depth)!
Just my 50cents 😉
Hi Guntram, thanks for your input!
It will be possible to choose custom colors so I hope colors are not the problem. 🙂
The problem with all of the orbital pictures is that they’re not really orbitals meaning they’re not the actual plots for the 99% probability of finding an electron. They’re just pictures made with TikZ resembling the actual plots. This means that by design they’re not going to look correct.
The $z^2$ ring is not drawn as a ring in the above pictures but as ellipses. For the first it is a filled ellipse and a smaller white one drawn above. The second one is a single ellipse with a thicker line width. If you (or anyone else) has a better or at least another idea I would love to hear it!
You’re right of course regarding the $x^2-y^2$ orbital. It looks awful. My TikZ-foo, unfortunately, is not that good. I’m open for ideas how to code a better one!
I am wondering if there is an option in chemmacros to write orbital names in a proper way or even electronic transitions like [cce lang=”latex”]\pi_v^* \rightarrow d_{x^2-y^2}[/cce]. In the package manual I was only able to find the possibility to draw orbitals; maybe this is planned in future versions?
There is no such option in chemmacros, yet. I’ve been asked this before but I’m hesitating to add something. writing [cce inline=”true” lang=”latex”]$d_{x^2-y^2}$[/cce] is not that complicated and I think there is nothing gained by a macro that hides it…
Hi,
There is a package called tikzorbitals, that also draws s, p and d orbitals and uses the command \orbital to do so. It is available on CTAN and is maintained by Germain Salvato-Vallverdu. I don’t know if you are familiar with this package.
Regards,
Thijs Cornelussen
Hi.
Yes, I know of that package (it’s in my list of packages). I must admit though that I had forgotten about it.
Regards