chemmacros v4.0

My chemmacros bundle has reached version 4.0. The step to a new major version has been made for two reasons: 1) the bundle has been extended with a new package: chemgreek. 2) every sub package can now be loaded and used independently. In all versions 3.* the ghsystem package, the chemformula package and the chemmacros package have loaded each other which made them one single package, really. This is no longer true. While chemmacros still loads ghsystem and chemformula (and also the new package chemgreek) the same is not true for ghsystem, chemformula or chemgreek. If they’re loaded alone they won’t load any other package of the bundle. Every package of the bundle now has got its own documentation. So instead of one single large file describing all four packages there are four different documentation files. At the same time I have decided to not longer provide a German and Italian version of the documentation. Although I am sorry for all users who have trouble reading an English documentation maintenance of three times four documentation files is too much. It has been tiresome and error-prone to keep the previous three files in sync! Below I’ll briefly go through the other changes introduced with version 4.0.

Changes with the chemmacros package

• The option bpchem has been dropped
• \mch and \pch now match chemformula’s charges
• The option method=mhchem has been dropped
• Extended support for uppercase greek letters that are for example used for IUPAC names. This is handled by the new package in the family: chemgreek. The new package will allow others packages to use the same macros for the greek letters to ensure a uniform typesetting. I have planned to use it in my chemnum package as well but this is a story for another post.
• \OX and \redox now work when \OX is placed in one of amsmath’s environments. Previously it ignored the measuring phase of these environments which made the nodes disappear.
• Language management is now done with the help of the translations package. This allows the automatic recognition of the document language. This also enables an easy extension of provided translations.
• The status of \Dfi and \Lfi was changed from deprecated to dropped.
• New option charges/partial-format
• New option reaction/list-heading
• The option charges/append is deprecated.

Changes with the chemformula package

• New command \charrow{}[][] that allows direct access to chemformula’s arrows.
• New command \chname()() that allows direct access to chemformula’s naming.
• New command \chcpd[]{} that allows typesetting a simple single formula — not usable inside \ch
• New command \setchemformula. This command can be used for setting the options when chemformula is loaded without chemmacros.

Changes with the ghsystem package

• Dropped requirement of the tabu package. Rumour has it that this package can not be relied upon.
• New options table-column-width and table-column-format.
• Adapted to changed language setting mechanism in chemmacros.
• New command: \loadghsystemlanguage.