Paper flashcards creator script

Prepare a set a flashcards to be printed on paper sheets with (Lua)Latex. The scripts produces a .tex file.

On this page:

Introduction
Usage
Custom preamble
Questions and Answers format
Advanced stuff

Introduction

Here is an example. You write some questions and answers, which you can format using Latex commands, in a text file. You then run mkfcs.pl to get a latex file that you compile to have a pdf file, with an even number of pages: one side contains the questions, the other the ansers (you have to print on both side, of course). There are several flashcards sizes you can choose from.

The question side (third declension of Ancient Greek):

The answer side:

Usage

Assuming you have a at least one files of questions and answers (see below), run:

perl mkfcs.pl -b -o=<output.tex> <input_file> [<input_file>[, ...]]
lualatex output.tex

With the -b switch, borders are drawn around each card.

Choose the number of flashcards per page you want with the -t option, e.g. -t=12. By default, you can choose between 8, 12 or 18. You can define your own format by editing the Templates.pm module.

With you the -h and -H switches, you can get online help.

Note that input file names that begin with '#' are ignored, so you can use paths from a file:

cat file-list | xargs perl mkfcs.pl

Custom preamble

You can (but are not required to) create a preamble.tex file in the current directory containing settings that you want to save and share between calls of mkfcs.pl script. The presence (or absence) of this file will be automatically detected.

For example, if you want to set the same font for all the flashcards you create from several calls of mkfcs.pl, create a preamble.tex file containing:

\setmainfont{Times New Roman}

Questions and Answers format

The file(s) containing the questions and answers is formatted as follows

White lines before the question and after the answer are ignored.

Question/Answer pairs are separated by white lines. That means that there must be no white line in a Question/Answer pair (use the LaTeX comment sign, if you want).

Question and Answer are separated by:

a line containing a single colon : (spaces before and after are allowed),
or by a double colon :: anywhere on a line.

Lines beginning by % are ignored (comments).

Here is an example:

question
:
answer

question::answer

question
::answer

See other examples in the samples directory.

Advanced stuff

You can use some formatting options in the format %%option-name:value. The options are as follows:

question-size: the size (normalsize, large, Large, etc.) for all the following questions in the file. The default value is Large, and this value is reset for each new file
answer-size: same as above, but for answers
question-font: if not empty, a command \\<MyFont>{...} is added around all the following questions in the file. The default value is nothing, and this value is reset for each new file.
answer-font: same as above, but for answers
define: define a macro which can be use later (in a option only) with the syntax \$macroname. The value of the option is macroname=value.

Here is an example of a file:

%%define:default-question-size:large
%%question-size:\\\$default-question-size

question
:
answer

%%question-size:Huge
question::answer
%%question-size:\$default-question-size

question
::answer