Chemical ASCII-art describes the utilization of ASCII art to represent chemical bonding structure. Start lines with a space, so that it will be formatted exactly as typed in a fixed-width font.

For this, one uses the "chemifishbone"

    |    |  -- --    |    |  -- --    |    |  -- --    |        |  -- --    |        |        

One can copy the length that you need or copy it several times to depict a longer structure.

This ASCII art structure can be used to represent bonding between different atoms, for example with carbon and oxygen:

    H    |    | H--C--OH    |    | H--C--OH    |    | H--C--OH    |        |    H 

or

    CH2-OH    |    CH-OH    |    CH2-OH 

For biochemistry one can use the carbon chemifishbone with carbon atoms filled in:

    |    |  --C--    |    |  --C--    |    |  --C--    |        |  --C--    |        | 

Or:

     |   --+--     |   --+--     |   --+--     | 

which reduces the visual clutter from carbon atoms which are always present.