Questions!

[BjornFJohansson]

Hi, I was about to roll my own solution for this, when I decided to look in pypi to see if it had been done already. I have a few questions.

1. Is the quizdown format formally defined somewhere?
2. Can it make blackboard tests?
3. What's the deal with rust? I installed from pypi using pip, does this also install the rust?
4. Can it be extended? I have another text format used by AMC called AMC-TXT.

The AMC (Auto Multiple Choice) software prints tests on paper and corrects the tests automatically from a scanned pdf of the returned papers. It is a great complement to Moodle and Blackboard.

[jjfiv]

Hi @BjornFJohansson,

quizdown is in production for me in my current courses. However, I don't have a lot of other users, so it's probably got some rough edges.

1. quizdown is parsed based on a subset of the commonmark spec. I don't have a formal grammar for it -- one could probably be created, but most of the rules are inherited from that format. It's intended that you can preview your files on, e.g., github, and have that be very close to reality.

2. I don't have access to blackboard (I'm using Canvas now) -- it's my hope that my new QTI support works there -- I'll work on pushing a release to pypi this weekend that has that support.

3. Rust was used because I can't compile python to javascript, so I could have a live web editor without paying for a server. If pip install worked, the Rust piece was installed just fine. The native code is built through github-actions and pushed to pypi as a wheel.

4. AMC-TXT is a very interesting format, but we'd need a whole new parser for it. It's more configurable than quizdown on grading, which is interesting, but less "immediately preview-able" which I like about the quizdown files (e.g., colors.md).

Presumably you have a lot of questions/quizzes in AMC-TXT format that you'd like to use on Blackboard/Moodle? It'd be hard to write a decent parser without such a dataset -- in my experience.