exams (version 2.2-1)

exams2pdf: Generation of Exams in PDF Format

Description

Automatic generation of exams in PDF format.

Usage

exams2pdf(file, n = 1L, nsamp = NULL, dir = ".", template = NULL, 
    inputs = NULL, header = list(Date = Sys.Date()), name = NULL, 
    control = NULL, encoding = "", quiet = TRUE, transform = NULL,
    edir = NULL, tdir = NULL, sdir = NULL, verbose = FALSE,
    points = NULL, …)
  
  make_exams_write_pdf(template = "plain", inputs = NULL,
    header = list(Date = Sys.Date()), name = NULL, quiet = TRUE,
    control = NULL)

Arguments

file

character. A specification of a (list of) exercise files.

n

integer. The number of copies to be compiled from file.

nsamp

integer. The number(s) of exercise files sampled from each list element of file. Sampling without replacement is used if possible. (Only if some element of nsamp is larger than the length of the corresponding element in file, sampling with replacement is used.)

dir

character specifying the output directory (default: current working directory). If only a single PDF file is produced and no dir is explicitly specified, the file is displayed on the screen rather than saved in dir.

template

character. A specification of a LaTeX template. The package currently provides "exam", "solution", "plain", among others. The default is to use the "plain.tex" file unless there are Rmd exercises in file for which "plain8.tex" is used. For further details see below.

inputs

character. Names of files that are needed as inputs during LaTeX compilation (e.g., style files, headers). Either the full path must be given or the file needs to be in edir.

header

list. A list of further options to be passed to the LaTeX files.

name

character. A name prefix for resulting exercises, by default chosen based on template.

control

A list of control arguments for the appearance of multiple choice results (see details).

encoding

character, passed to xweave.

quiet

logical. Should output be suppressed when calling xweave and texi2dvi.

transform

function. An optional transform driver passed to xexams (by default no transformation is used).

edir

character specifying the path of the directory in which the files in file are stored (see also below).

tdir

character specifying a temporary directory, by default this is chosen via tempdir. Note that this is cleaned up and potentially temporary files are deleted.

sdir

character specifying a directory for storing supplements, by default this is chosen via tempdir.

verbose

logical. Should information on progress of exam generation be reported?

points

integer. How many points should be assigned to each exercise? Note that this argument overules any exercise points that are provided within the expoints tags of the exercise files (if any). The vector of points supplied should either have length 1 or the number of exercises in the exam.

…

further arguments passed on to xweave.

Value

exams2pdf returns a list of exams as generated by xexams. make_exams_write_pdf returns a function that is suitable for being supplied as driver$write to xexams.

Details

exams2pdf is a more flexible re-implementation of the old (version 1) exams function (Gruen and Zeileis 2009), using the new extensible xexams framework (Zeileis et al. 2014). A detailed introduction is provided in vignette("exams", package = "exams"), also pointing out relative advantages of the new interface. exams2pdf proceeds by using make_exams_write_pdf to set up a custom driver$write function on the fly before calling xexams. This custom driver combines each exams with the desired template (and inputs etc.) and then calls texi2dvi on the resulting LaTeX file to produce PDF output. For a single exam (n = 1) the resulting PDF is displayed on screen (unless dir is explicitly specified) while for n > 1 the PDF files are stored in the output directory dir.

References

Gruen B, Zeileis A (2009). Automatic Generation of Exams in R. Journal of Statistical Software, 29(10), 1--14. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v29/i10/. Zeileis A, Umlauf N, Leisch F (2014). Flexible Generation of E-Learning Exams in R: Moodle Quizzes, OLAT Assessments, and Beyond. Journal of Statistical Software, 58(1), 1--36. http://www.jstatsoft.org/v58/i01/.

See Also

xexams, exams, texi2dvi

Examples

## load package and enforce par(ask = FALSE)
options(device.ask.default = FALSE)

if(interactive()) {
## compile a single random exam (displayed on screen)
exams2pdf(list(
  "boxplots",
  c("tstat", "ttest", "confint"),
  c("regression", "anova"),
  "scatterplot",
  "relfreq"
))
}