Another Joy of the GPL: Typesetting Complicated Exams in LaTeX

I'm a total nerd. A teacher nerd, to boot! What's my word-processor of choice? A combination of eMacs and LaTeX (with a little bit of dvipdfm for dvi->PDF translation). You can do anything with this combination (including PDFs with clickable links in them! [an example]).

I just finally tracked down a hard-to-find[1] package (a LaTeX plug-in) for typesetting complicated exams. Examdesign, (here's the tarball ) authored by Jason Alexander (formerly?) of UCSD, will let you write an exam in a simple mark-up text format while it takes care of the hard stuff like randomizing questions, making answer keys, etc. And what's even cooler than that? It's offered under a GPL license which means I can distribute it even if the author gets nuked off of the face of the planet... to ensure that all students have the privilege of gorgeously typeset, mutliple-versioned exams in any question format I want.

[1] I was only able to find it in one place: here.
Posted by joebeone at Febrero 22, 2004 04:35 PM