General Introduction

/!\ this is a first draft

Mathmaker creates Sheets of maths Exercises. Each Exercise contains Questions. Each Question uses objects from the core, that embbed enough information to compute and write the text of the Question and also the answer.

The informations embedded by the core objects are independant from the output format. For instance, a Question about Pythagora's theorem would embed an object RightTriangle (which itself embeds information on its sides' lengths for instance ; and enough methods to create a picture of it) but also fields telling if the figure should be drawn in the Question's text or if only a description of the figure should be given ; if the hypotenuse should be calculated or another side ; if the result should be a rounded decimal and how precise it should be etc.

When a new Sheet is created, all objects it contains are created randomly (following some rules, though...).

The "Machine" object can be seen as a typewriter : it takes the mathematical objects and turns them into the output format (LaTeX, so far) ; it draws figures from the geometrical objects (using eukleides) etc. The Sheet object given to a Machine is a guideline for the Machine to type what is expected on output.

So, the main executable, mathmaker, just creates a (LaTeX) Machine and let it "type" the sheet the user has given as parameter.

All content created by mathmaker is written in stdin (except debugging informations, which are written in stderr).

Some details before diving into core :

• The file mathmaker.cfg contains some variable the user might like to change easily without having to dive into the code

• The lib directory contains various methods and variables

• The locale directory contains all stuff related to internationalization (here are the po files to edit with poedit)

• The maintenance directory contains anything related to debugging and to tests.