8

There is a very nice online service called texercises where you can collect, tag and search exercise problems written with LaTeX and then combine them easily to a custom exercise sheet. Since I often have to work offline I want something a similar solution which runs completely on my computer (I don't need the sharing aspect of texercises, it's just for my private collections).

So is there something similar for offline use? How do you solve the problem of organizing, collecting, tagging, searching and combining exercise problems for yourself?

Edit There is also the following german site http://smart.uni-bayreuth.de/ However you cannot host your own exercises and you cannot use it offline as well.

student
  • 29,003
  • 6
    This is a nice question, I am working on it for two years now, but I am just lacking time –  Aug 27 '14 at 11:25
  • @ChristianHupfer What's the status of your project? Is there a git repository or something like that to see an early alpha version? – student Jun 24 '16 at 12:35
  • @student: No, I don't use github for public access -- I don't like forking (as well as I don't fork!) ... and still lack of time. My regular job needs too much attention –  Jun 24 '16 at 13:33
  • I think I will try (if I have enough time) to setup something by myself. I am not sure if it is a good idea to use django or something like that. Another idea would be a pure emacs solution... – student Jun 24 '16 at 17:38
  • I have no idea what django is –  Jun 24 '16 at 19:45
  • https://www.djangoproject.com/ – student Jun 25 '16 at 11:28

2 Answers2

4

Instead of reinventing the wheel, reduce the problem to something already solved: archiving/tagging/searching etc are the core competency of reference manager software.

How this can be used for this special purpose?

  1. Create an individual .tex file for every single exercise. They could share a common .tex file which contains the preamble to make things easier. Compile them all to a .pdf.

  2. Add these .pdfs to reference manager software. For example with https://www.mendeley.com/ you can now add the .tex files to the respective .pdf files. And as long as you don't change the files name updating the files is also no problem, as the paths of the original files are linked.

  3. Now you can create all sorts of tags for the exercises, sort them into categories and much more.

  1. Everything set up, you can now search for specific tags, words in the files, categories and so on to select which exercises you want to use.

  2. Create a .tex file for your assignment and add all the selected files via e.g. https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/11318/36296

Community
  • 1
samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
  • 158,329
3

I wrote a program for this exact purpose. It browses your computer for .tex files, extracts the exercises and let you preview them. You can select the ones you like and export your work either to a .tex or .pdf file.

It's called TeXamator, you can find it here : https://github.com/alexisflesch/texamator

It's opensource, don't hesitate to give it a try.

Alexis
  • 439