testbuilder

What it is

A command-line tool written in Rust for building tests in LaTeX from tests in the following form

Why did the chicken cross the street?
A) To talk to a friend
B) To get to the other side
C) The chicken did not cross the street
ANSWER B

There should be many such questions, of course. Check out the example in the "example_test.txt"

The application will shuffle the order of the questions and also the order inside the answer - what was A will become e.g. C etc.

You will get a nice looking test sheet after compiling with (pdf)LaTeX.

Building from source

Requirements:

• Rust (install from https://rustup.rs)
• LaTeX with pdflatex command
• pdfcpu (optional, only needed for PDF merging feature)

cargo build --release

The binary will be available at target/release/tb.

How to use it

Run the tb binary with the following arguments:

1. Source file with the test in the above format
2. Output file name (say, "test" will get you a bunch of LaTeX files: "test1.tex", "test2.tex" etc. -- this can also include full path)
3. Number of different test variants to generate
4. Title of the test (e.g. "Medicine exam 2023")
5. What should go before the beginning of the test (LaTeX formatted, e.g. name/surname fields)
6. "newpage" to add a page break at the end, or "_" to skip
7. "merge" to merge all PDFs into one file, or "_" to skip

Example usage: ./tb egzamin2023.txt results/res_test 3 "Biophysics, exam 2023" "Name, Surname, Group \underline{\hspace{11.5cm}}" newpage merge

This will output 3 LaTeX files named res_test1.tex, res_test2.tex, and res_test3.tex, along with the LaTeX style file test.sty. All files will be automatically compiled to PDF using pdflatex. Each test will have different question and answer orders. For example, the first resulting PDF may look like this:

and the third like this: