When working on complex molecular models, clarity is key. Visualizing structural measurements like bond lengths or angles is essential—but what’s equally important is how these measurements are displayed. Without appropriate visual cues, it’s easy for annotations to clutter your workspace or become unreadable when zooming or rotating your model. That’s where customizing the appearance of measurement labels in SAMSON can make a real difference.
In SAMSON, every time you use the Measure editor to check distances, angles, or torsions, you can save those measurements as labels in your document. Once saved, labels are not static: they can be fully styled to suit your project’s visual needs.
Why Customize Labels?
Customizing labels is not just about aesthetics. It’s also helpful for:
- Improving readability against different background styles.
- Distinguishing between multiple types of measurements (e.g., distances vs angles).
- Highlighting particular molecular interactions or structural regions.
Where to Change Label Appearance
Once a measurement is saved as a label, select it and open the Inspector. From there, you can customize:
- Font: Adjust the label’s font directly in the Inspector interface.
- Text color: Change the color of the label’s text using the color picker.
- Distance line color: Modify the color of the lines representing atom-to-atom distances.
- Angle or torsion plane color: Set custom colors for planes involved in angular or torsional measurements.
Resetting to Defaults
Made too many changes? No problem. SAMSON makes it easy to revert:
- Double-click on the colored text in the Inspector to reset it to its default color.
- To reset text color, simply click the X icon next to the Text color field.
Set Global Preferences
If you prefer using the same label style across your documents, change global preferences in Preferences > Rendering > Labels. There you can:
- Choose a default font used for unspecific labels
- Set the number of decimal places for angles and distances
Measurement Labels Stay Smart
Once added, measurement labels are dynamic: they update automatically if the position of atoms or charges changes. You retain full control over how these labels fit into your visual analysis, whether you’re presenting your structure, preparing a figure for publication, or working interactively.
Learn more about customizing labels and working with molecular measurements in the full documentation: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/measuring/.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.