This is very cool. Clipboard-to-SMILES Converter (C2SC), is a macOS application that directly converts molecular structures from the clipboard. The app focuses on seamlessly converting screenshots of molecules into a desired molecular representation. It supports a wide range of molecular representations, such as SMILES, SELFIES, InChI’s, IUPAC names, RDKit Mol’s, and CAS numbers, allowing effortless conversion between these formats within the clipboard. Full details are in the publication here DOI
The tool is open source so it can be expanded by the community and can be directly downloaded at https://github.com/O-Schilter/Clipboard-to-SMILES-Converter. Note the application is a 2.8 GB zip file download.
Once installed (you will have to authorise the application in the Security and Privacy preferences) a small icon appear in the top toolbar bar. If you now copy a SMILES to the clipboard, and then choose
convert clipboard to image from the dropdown menu from the icon the in a a second of so you should see this image
You can now paste the image into an application.
If you copy an image of a structure to the clipboard you can convert it to a variety of molecular representations e.g. InChi, and then paste that into an application.
The central representation is SMILES format and the key functions are X-to-SMILES and SMILES-to-X.
Whilst most of the functionality runs locally, interactions with Opsin and PubChem require internet access.
This is a really useful application and provides an invaluable tool for manipulating single molecule representations.
I would assume that other formats can be included by adding convertors. OpenBabel currently supports over 110 file formats some of which are rarely used, however inclusion of .mol and .sdf format might be useful. iBabel provides an interface to OpenBabel plus a 3D viewer and access to a number of unix commands useful for dealing with very large files.