Ribbon style editor, scaling and helix/coil/strand cross-sections

[olibclarke@…]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Oliver Clarke
Subject: Possible enhancements to ribbon style editor for ChimeraX
Date: February 15, 2016 at 1:36:39 PM PST
To: Tom Goddard

Was just trying to alter the style of a particular figure using the ribbon style editor, and there are a couple of things I think could be improved:

• In the scaling tab, I think there should be an overall scale factor, so that one can uniformly alter the thickness of everything without having to tweak individual proportions.

• In the cross section tab, I think there should be three tabs in each cross section profile (by default the same), for what to apply to helix, coil and strands. If I am making a representation like that attached, where the ribbons are edged, I do not want that applied to the coils, which I think should have a circular cross section - right now that means I need to apply different ribbon cross sections individually to different secondary structures, rather than just applying a single style to the whole model.

• Also, if there is any way to create a "curved cylinder" representation for helices, applied as a ribbon style rather than as per pipes and planks, I really think it is essential - having good reduced representations of molecules that preserve as much information as possible is increasingly important as solved structures become larger and more complex. E.g. check out the number of curved helices in the attached structure - ribbons are not optimal because it is so big, but pipes and planks looks like a mess...

Cheers,
Oli.

[Elaine Meng]

Now we have curved-cylinder helices (cartoon style modeh tube), but not yet straight cylinders (#1242) nor a cartoon style editor GUI.