Keywords: abcmol molecular modeling manual

# Abcmol Manual

Abcmol is a modified version of RasMol designed to accept input in the .abc format, which is used by the Tbtools molecular modeling package. RasMol was written by Roger Sayle and further developed by several others. It is released under an open source license described here. The modifications of necessary for reading .abc files were made by Stephen Jordan. Abcmol sourcecode is in the abcmol subdirectory. To compile Abcmol it should suffice to execute make in the directory containing the source code. Then try executing abcmol. If you get the error message "No suitable display detected," this probably means that the color depth is incorrectly set in the makefile. In Makefile there are the following three lines:
    DEPTHDEF = -DTHIRTYTWOBIT
    # DEPTHDEF = -DSIXTEENBIT
    # DEPTHDEF = -DEIGHTBIT
Comment out the first line by prefacing it with a # and uncomment whichever line you think will work on your computer, execute "make clean" followed by make, and then try running abcmol again. By default abcmol assumes that its inputs are in .abc format. The command "abcmol foo.abc" should cause a window to pop up displaying foo.abc. Additional commands have been provided to handle the extra data fields that can be added to .abc files. To use these commands first type abcmol. Then you should be given an abcmol command prompt. Type "load abcN foo.abc", where N is a number 1 through 4. Loading abc4 will cause the color of the bonds to be determined by the data field of the bond lines in the .abc files. Loading abc1, abc2, or abc3, will cause the color of the atoms to be determined by the first, second, or third optional data field in the atom lines, respectively. In almost all other respects, abcmol is just RasMol and the RasMol documentation is the best place to look for further information. To the Tbtools manual.