When working on complex molecular models, visual clarity can make all the difference. If your structures are crowded with overlapping labels and measurements, it becomes harder to analyze your data, communicate your findings, or even stay focused. Fortunately, SAMSON provides powerful tools not just to measure molecular elements but to customize how those measurements are displayed. This can greatly improve the readability of your workspace and help you focus on what matters most.
Why Customize Measurement Appearance?
Sometimes, you’re interested in specific distances or torsions within a macromolecule. Highlighting those measurements using different colors, fonts, and offsets can prevent visual overload and draw attention to key parts of the structure. Whether you’re highlighting hydrogen bonds, dihedrals around a hinge, or partial charges, visual customization gives you control without changing the underlying geometry.
What Can You Customize?
When you save a measurement as a label in SAMSON, you unlock access to customizable styling:
- Line color (for distance or angles)
- Angle plane color (for torsions)
- Font style and size
- Text color
- Offset positioning to avoid overlaps
Where to Edit Appearance
All measurement styling is done in the Inspector. Simply select the label you’re customizing and access its appearance properties.
The Inspector lets you:
- Change the line or plane color via a color selector
- Reset any custom color by double-clicking the entry or clicking the X icon
- Adjust font and offset parameters as needed
Examples in Action
Here are some examples from SAMSON’s documentation showing how customized labels can improve clarity:
Custom line and text colors for atom-atom distances:
Custom color visualization for torsion angles:
Resetting text color:
Selecting a font for measurement labels:
Default Settings and Preferences
If you want consistent styling across all your labels, you can define global preferences in Preferences > Rendering > Labels. There, you can:
- Set default font style for unspecific labels
- Choose how many decimal places should appear in distances and angles
This approach is useful if you often reuse similar models or need to maintain a publication-style consistency.
Conclusion
Whether you’re preparing a figure for a publication or trying to understand a molecular mechanism more clearly, customizing how distances, angles, and torsions appear in your SAMSON models can give you exactly the visual aid you need. By adjusting fonts, colors, and other appearance settings directly in the Inspector, you can streamline your workflow and make your work visually informative for others.
To learn more about these features and explore other measurement tools, visit the official documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at samson-connect.net.