Exam poll generator?

Question

I need a recomendation for some good LaTeX document generator.

I have two lists of questions - I want the Generator - to make a given number of exam polls which will have first question from the first list, and second question from the second list.

I'm on Kubuntu 11.10 and a fan of Emacs - but the more general the solution - the better. Preferably - the solution should be requiring tex/latex installation only.

Of course I could write it myself in Python - but I'm sure something similar in functionality is implemented in many ways already - the question is - what is better/easier to do - to learn an existing package (I don't know one) - or to write it from scratch in Python.

Answer 1

Assuming each question is some sort of item and you can put the questions on one line in the input files and they have matching braces in the input. You can use the \read primitive. It works by reading lines from a stream and assigning them to some command. If you simply want a list of questions you can generate them one at a time using this command. The code might look something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
  \newread\myread
  \openin\myread=text.dat
  \newcount\questcount
  \makeatletter
  \noindent
  \@whilesw\unless\ifeof\myread\fi{%
    {\endlinechar=-1 \global\readline\myread to \temp}%
    %This is to avoid an additional space at the end of each line
    \if\temp\par\else%
      %An extra line is added to the end of extra stream. 
      %According to TeX by topic it is equivallent with \par, so check for it.
      \advance\questcount by 1%
      \textbf{Question \number\questcount.} \temp\\%
    \fi%
  }
  \closein\myread
  \makeatother
\end{document}

While the input (text.dat) could look like this:

What is the square root of 144?
Show that any simple graph with smallest degree greater or equal to 2 contains a cycle.

and the result would look like:

Naturally you could then do something similar for the second file.

Answer 2

You could also try the exsheets package. Possibility to input random questions from a file is included. I'm afraid the file with questions will need some formatting, though...