Managing a math exercise database with LATEX

TEX is a good tool for creating beautiful books, especially when the book contains a lot of math formulas. It is not rare that TEX is used to typeset a view of a database, by generating TEX source from the database text, possibly using XML as an intermediate format. Some TEX packages and formats support reading XML data directly. In the matbook project we have created a database of math exercises for special class secondary school students, as well as solutions and instructions for teachers. The data is organized in a tree structure of custom LATEX environments in .tex source files. LATEX reads these data files several times for generating the books. CVS is used for data replication and concurrent co-authoring. We are planning to switch to using a LATEX-to-HTML translator to publish the database on the web. This paper presents the simple software architecture of the matbook project and the design decisions we made concerning software and workflow, and it also compares matbook with other approaches such as big content management systems and TEX-enabled wikis. Non-standard use of TEX The original purpose of TEX (and LATEX) was typesetting beautiful books, journals and other printed material. Novel uses include preparing slides for talks, developing software and its documentation together (e.g. web and ltxdoc), typesetting math formulas (e.g. Texvc [11]), typesetting printed and on-line HTML documentation together, rearranging PDF pages (pdfTEX with pdfpages.sty) and typesetting text generated from databases or other markup formats. In the matbook project we use LATEX to read a database of math exercises (in several passes), and typeset the material to books for students and teachers. This paper presents the software architecture and some implementation details of the matbook project, and it is also a case study of integrating excellent free software tools for low-budget publishing. Project goals and products The Fazekas Mihály Secondary Grammar School of Budapest [1] has been launching special mathematics classes for several decades, and is proud of its students winning national and international student competitions, and later becoming appreciated mathematicians. E.g. László Lovász, the well-known Hungarian mathematician, graduated from Fazekas in 1966. Good mathematicians have good problem solving skills, and this skill can be best developed by solving problems and exercises. It is the responsibility of the teacher to choose the exercises for the students which best fit their learning curve. Talented students in a special math class need special attention. A lot of exercises and didactic experience have accumulated in Fazekas over the last few decades, and we have decided to publish this in printed form in Hungary; we are also planning to provide a web interface where all material is available. Thus matbook was born. We are compiling a comprehensive exercise database (which also includes solutions, didactic advice, exercise lists for lessons and metadata for more accurate searching). Students and teachers in Fazekas are both working on extending this database, and we are developing software that would present this database to its audience. We are planning to publish exercise books (for students) and teachers’ guides. If students buy the exercise books, teachers can give homework assignments from those books. (Of course, teachers will assign exercises whose solutions cannot be found in the exercise book.) TUGboat, Volume 27 (2006), No. 1—Proceedings of EuroTEX2006 57 Péter Szabó and András Hraskó We are also planning to provide a web interface on which visitors can browse and view exercises, solutions etc., they can do a full text search, and they can also search for exercises in a given topic (specified using a set of predefined keywords). We already have a web interface for a comprehensive database of Hungarian secondary school math contest problems (which stores text in LATEX format, and converts it to HTML using TTH [2]), and we’d like unify this with the matbook database.