Babel Program
Genesis XI: "And the Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

Engraving The Confusion of Tongues by Gustave Doré (1865), who based his conception on the Minaret of Samarra

 

  • OpenBabel:  Link to a very useful tool for converting molecular input file formats.
Key links to learn about Babel:
Unzip babel16.zip into a directory for executing the program.
Unzip babelwin.zip into a temporary directory and then run setup.exe.The GUI implementation will be loaded in the program files.
See the instructions on the links above for running the program.

Notes:

It is best to use a short-name directory (8 characters or less as in DOS) with a short path for the program executables, and keep the input and output files in the same directory or one directory down.  For example, put the programs babelwin and babel16 in the directory c:\babel

If you wish to convert a GAUSSIAN Z-matrix, it is necessary to use actual numbers on the atom coordinate lines for the distances, angles, and dihedral angles.  The Babel program does not recognize variable names and constant names for these quantities.