Responsible for the RasMol interface for Windows and Macintosh platforms is Raphaël Leplae (lp1@sanger.ac.uk).
):
a simple shell script
(rasmolscript) and a more laborious tcl/tk script
(rmscop).
Both rasmolscript and rmscop will display the selected molecule, colored as follows:
alpha helix (magenta)
beta strand (yellow)
turn residues (blue)
remaining residues, i.e. random coil (white)
parts of this PDB chain not in this domain (red-orange)
other chains in this PDB file (violet)
RasMol will then allow to rotate and manipulate the molecule and select among plenty of useful display options.
The main difference bewteen rasmolscript and rmscop is the ability of the latter of talking to an existing RasMol window (instead of opening a new window at every invocation) and selecting the window to which the image should be sent. This permits to see two or more structures at the same time. The price to pay is installing tcl/tk.
rmscop comes in two flavors. The original version, implemented by Tim Hubbard, has been made easily configurable and tested both on old and new tcl/tk releases for compatibility. It will be supported at MRC, and is primarily intended for unix/linux users. Instructions for installing rmscop.
The new version, rmscop2, will be maintained by its author, Raphaël Leplae. From a functional point of view, rmscop and rmscop2 are comparable, but the latter offers a user interface with options available only from the latest tcl/tk release (8.3). According to his author, rmscop2 is not compatible with previous tcl/tk releases that you may have installed on your system.
Both rmscop and rmscop2 are locally configurable, allow to specify an ftp site for downloading pdb files in case these are not locally available, and are optimized to download a pdb file only once (from then on, it will be found at a location of your choice on your machine.)
If you don't have tcl/tk already installed on your system and you don't want to install it, you can still view structures in SCOP using rasmolscript.