[OS X TeX] Multiple tex file search

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jun 3, 2012, at 9:40 AM, Themis Matsoukas wrote:

> On Jun 2, 2012, at 9:13 PM, Alain Schremmer wrote:
>
>>
>> But (why) don't you keep them all in a same super-folder? I even  
>> keep the style sheets there!
>>
>
> For my course I maintain a latex database of more than 100 homework  
> problems, each stored in its own folder, along with its figures,  
> mathematica notebooks, etc. I then include those selectively into my  
> assignments each week. It would be great for me to search (and spell- 
> check) them in one shot.

I can see that.

But my wife and I have a recurrent argument with one of our sons, a  
software engineer: Find versus Browse.

We want roughly to organize the many, many books/CD on our shelves so  
as to find what we want in a finite amount of time. He tries to  
convince us "just" to enter them in a database and then search for  
what we want. But therein lies the issue. While we want to be able to  
find what we want, more often than not, we do not know what we want  
and are just browsing for something to read/listen to tonight.

As for the problems for my students, my own (eventual) "solution" was  
to organize things around what I called, for lack of a better term,  
"checkable items" placed on "shelves". See the attached pdf of "shelf  
17" (For Chapter 17) where each line is a checkable item that  
corresponds to a file in a database. The check-marks indicate if the  
relevant part of the file has been filled-in with an actual question  
or not.  (Qz = quiz, Hw = Homework, Rt = Review test, Rs = Review  
discussion, Ex = Exam. )

The database is then used by Nicola Talbot’s probsoln package to  
create a Quiz/Homework/Review test/Review discussion Exam. It was  
Chris Goedde who wrote the first version of the whole thing. Thanks to  
both.

Best regards
--schremmer


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