Per Kraulis (University of Cambridge, UK): "When publishing a three-dimensional protein structure determined by X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance, there is a need to show overviews of the structure, as well as detailed close-ups of
regions of interest, such as binding sites. There was a lack of good, easy-to-use software to prepare such plots, so I decided to write such a program, called MolScript. It was my intention from the start to make the program readily available to the academic community.
"I decided to use PostScript (from Adobe Systems Inc., Mountain View, Calif.) as output format, since most labs have access to laser printers that can handle PostScript. Luckily, this choice also simplified a number of technical problems in the programming. The program reads an input file that describes what to plot and how. The user can mix different kinds of representations (such as ball-and-stick together with alpha- helices ...
