Re: Macro's for making an exam.

[Hans Bezemer]

Dear Oliver,

Thanks for the detailed answer.

I will take a look at UTP (have downloaded it).
Will give a heads up when I have a working example.

Kind regards,

Hans

On 21/06/07 08:04PM, Oliver Corff wrote:
> Hi Hans,
> 
> That sounds like an interesting challenge to learn groff, especially
> after being familiar with LaTeX.
> 
> Groff is certainly more terse as a language and has some tricky points
> when defining macros and nested commands (you'll need multiple escapes)
> but the basics are easy to grasp and the language is quite forgiving in
> the sense that faulty code won't crash anything. There are plenty of
> warning messages issued by groff if things do not go as expected, and
> the best proof that something went fundamentally wrong is a blank sheet
> of output.
> 
> If you have defined "building blocks" for the composition of your exam
> sheets you can store them in external files which you call with
> 
> .so myfile.roff
> 
> (.so mnemonic: source file). Don't forget piping everything via soelim
> to the groff processor if you do that.
> 
> That helps visually declobber the file where you keep your macros.
> 
> Conditionals are called with
> 
> .if cond anything
> 
> (see groff(7) for a summary list of all requests ("Request Short
> Reference").
> 
> A detailed overview of conditionals can be found, e.g., on p. 46 of the
> Nroff/Troff User's Manual that comes with Heirloom Documentation Tools
> (I just happen to find this one first); a thorough discussion of
> "Conditional Execution" can be found on pp. 278 of Unix Text Processing
> by Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly (the book is better known as UTP,
> though).
> 
> Your question if you have to run groff twice if you want to present
> collected information on the first page: in general, yes. That is, as
> long as you deal with the traditional macro packages (that is also the
> reason why with the default  commands of the -ms macros a table of
> contents is placed at the end of the book, not the beginning, if no
> measure is taken). However, the mom macro package and its wrapper
> pdfmom, will help you place collected material near the beginning of the
> document as pdfmom takes care of the necessary number of steps to
> compile a complete document.
> 
> Hope that helps,
> 
> Oliver.
> 
> 
> 
> On 07/06/2021 15:37, Hans Bezemer wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I've started working with groff recently.
> > Being a teacher I have three types of documents I mainly create:
> > 1. Articles;
> > 2. Presentations;
> > 3. Exams.
> > 
> > I'm using LaTeX (article, beamer, exam) for those documents at the moment.
> > 
> > To get my feet wet with groff I want to create a set of macros for making a 
> > test.
> > 
> > Goal is to make it compatible with the mm, ms and mom macrosets.
> > The macro's have to be able to print the number of questions, the sum of 
> > the points when called for.
> > the format of question is simple and should be:
> > <numberofpointS>    <Question>
> > whereas the <numberofpoints> are placed in the margin.
> > 
> > I would like to be able to toggle between printing the solution or space to 
> > answer the question, thus
> > something along these lines (with arbitrary choosen macronames):
> > ****
> > 
> > Introduction on the question
> > 
> > .Q1 2
> > .\" 2 is the number of points
> > Question...
> > .Q2
> > .A1
> > .\" start of answer block
> > All sorts of formatting to use to answer the question:
> > lines, grid, drawing.
> > .A2
> > .S1
> > .\"start of solution block
> > Block to explain the answer to the question
> > .S2
> > 
> > And when a variable `a' is set 0 then A1/A2 block is printed
> > and S1/2 block is ignored.
> > When `a' is 1 then the other way around.
> > 
> > I would like to get a few pointers.
> > What would be a good way to conditional ignore a specific block of text?
> > It could be done with sed of course, letting it delete anything between and 
> > including S1 and S2 before piping the text into groff, but I would like to 
> > do it within groff.
> > 
> > Secondly, I want to put the sum of the points and number of questions on 
> > the first page.
> > Is it needed to run groff twice to get does values?
> > 
> > Thanks in advance.
> > 
> > Kind regards,
> > 
> > Hans Bezemer
> > 
>