I’ll describe an NSF-funded project to use TeX to produce self-scoring and otherwise interactive PDF documents for educational use. D.P. Story’s AcroTeX Education Bundle already has a great deal of the necessary functionality and will serve as the starting point.
The objective is to produce customized documents — including tests — that are essentially independent of a testing system or other restricted environment. This is needed to make content more portable and less dependent on speci c systems. PDF provides satisfactory functionality for the end product. The missing link is a source format that complies to PDF, complete with forms, links, and embedded JavaScript, and that can be written both by software problem generators and (in principle anyway) humans. An enhancement of TeX seems ideal.
