Managing a math exercise database with L A T E X
Péter G. N. Szabó, András Hraskó · 2006
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. L A TEX 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 ma