mi-yu/latex-exam

Compile an exam in .exam format into LaTeX.

latex-exam

Transpile an exam in .exam format into LaTeX.

Why I made this

Making exams in LaTeX can be painful and tedious. I wrote this tool to expedite the formatting process. It reads your input .exam file, and produces a pdf of the exam and answer key in LaTeX.

Installation

On Ubuntu

Clone the repo into a directory of your choice. Create a symbolic link in ~/bin/ to examtex:

ln -s file/to/repo/examtex ~/bin/examtex
chmod +x ~/bin/examtex
source ~/.bashrc

and that should be that.

On anything else

Idk how/if it works on any other operating systems.

How to use it

This tool requires python 3 to produce the .tex files, and latexmk (which should come with most TeX distributions) to then produce the pdf.

examtex is a bash script which takes arguments

examtex -option filepath/filename.exam

and produces filename-EXAM.tex and filename-KEY.tex in the same directory. The available options are:

• -p: will create filename-EXAM.pdf and filename-KEY.pdf
• -c: will create filename-EXAM.pdf and filename-KEY.pdf and clean up the auxiliary files.

Alternatively, you can produce the tex files without the bash script using

python3 examtex.py filepath/filename.exam

The sublime syntax and build files

If you're writing your exams in sublime, you can get some sweet syntax highlighting by putting Exam.sublime-syntax in the appropriate directory (on Ubuntu: ~/.config/sublime-text-3/Packages/User/). You can get a build system by putting Exam.sublime-build in the same directory; then using ctrl-b will automatically run

examtex -c $file

for the current file.

Making .exam files

A sample exam is provided in tutorial/sample.exam. Exams are organized into sections, each containing modules. Sections and modules are headed by a tag: [Section] represents the start of a new section, and [FRQ] represents the start of a module for free-response questions.

A full tour of the expected .exam file format can be found in the documentation and tutorial.