ouexam v2.4.2

ouexam document class v2.4.2, 30 August 2019

This LaTeX2ε document class enables the production of University of Otago formatted examination papers. It handles all the fiddly layout requirements (such as printing “TURN OVER” at the bottom of every page except the last), and also ensures that the actual number of marks for questions in the examination add up to the expected number of marks.

Requirements

You will need the verbatim, fontenc, textcomp, lmodern, and pgfkeys packages in order to use ouexam. These should all come standard with most TeX installations. To build the documentation and example files, you will need graphicx, hyperref, at least version 1.1 of the listings package, and the pdfjam tool.

Installing

To install the easy way:

1 Unpack the distribution archive and cd to the distribution directory.

2 make

3 make install TEXMFHOME=/path/to/texmf. /path/to/texmf should be the root of your preferred texmf tree (e.g., /usr/share/texmf). You may need to do this as root depending on which texmf tree you are installing into. You can also define TEXMFHOME as an environment variable then simply type make install.

To install manually, unpack the distribution archive, cd to the distribution directory, and do the following (now you know why there’s a Makefile ☺).

latex ouexam.ins
pdflatex example1.tex
pdflatex example1.tex
pdfjam --outfile eg1-1.pdf example1.pdf 1
pdfjam --outfile eg1-2.pdf example1.pdf 2
pdfjam --outfile eg1-3.pdf example1.pdf 3
pdflatex example2.tex
pdflatex example2.tex
pdfjam --outfile eg2-1.pdf example2.pdf 1
pdfjam --outfile eg2-2.pdf example2.pdf 2
pdfjam --outfile eg2-3.pdf example2.pdf 3
pdfjam --outfile eg2-4.pdf example2.pdf 4
pdflatex ouexam.dtx
pdflatex ouexam.dtx
pdflatex ouexam.dtx

Put ouexam.cls in /path/to/texmf/tex/latex/ouexam.

Put eg*.pdf, ouexam.pdf, ouexam.dtx, ouexam.ins, HISTORY, MANIFEST, README and TODO in /path/to/texmf/doc/latex/ouexam.

Put Create*.pdf, example*.tex, example*.pdf and lstlang0.sty in /path/to/texmf/doc/latex/ouexam/example.

You can also build the examples using GUI tools such as TeXMaker, TeXShop, etc. (but see the FAQ below).

FAQ

The number of marks for my questions are not appearing at the end of the line even though there is plenty of room for them to fit.

You probably have a blank line between the end of your question text and the \end{question} macro that actually generates the number of marks. The line break gets processed by TeX before the number of marks is generated and effectively generates a new paragraph. Until I figure out how to stop this from happening, the workaround is to not leave blank lines between the end of the question text and the \end{question}.

I fixed that, but there’s still vertical space between the end of my question and the number of marks.

This is almost certainly because the question text ends with a list-based environment of some sort (including itemize, enumerate, description, list, quote, quotation, center, flushleft, and flushright). I’m not convinced that this can be fixed in a general way, but a workaround is to subtract a negative multiple of \lastskip immediately before the \end{question} (or whatever), e.g., \vskip-2\lastskip. -2 is about right if you want the marks to appear on the line following the question text, while -4.75 is about right if you want the marks to be aligned with the final line of the question text.

Why can’t I build content.tex?

content.tex is an include file for both example1.tex and example2.tex. It doesn’t have a \documentclass and you therefore can’t pdflatex it! The only input files you should be building are example1.tex and example2.tex.

How do I get rid of “(Subject to inspection by the examiners)”?

Add this to the document preamble:

\makeatletter
\def\@copiesof{Blah blah blah.}
\makeatother

Do not use the \copiesof macro.

How do I change “N/A” to “NIL” (or or similar)?

Add this to the document preamble, before you use any of \material, \copiesof, or \otherinstructions:

\makeatletter
% Replace "N/A" with "NIL" to keep exams office happy :P
\def\@NA{NIL}
\let\@material\@NA
\let\@copiesof\@NA
\let\@otherinst\@NA
\makeatother

You can then use \material, \copiesof, or \otherinstructions as required. Unused options will print as “NIL”.