: What is the best software for creating exam paper template? I regularly create exam papers in Photoshop with two types of pages: left and right. We create the questions in Word and then add

@Margaret771

I created lined paper using a script (Perl in my case) to write SVG+css. This is then merged with other elements to put on the page (personal logo, special text, etc.) in Inkscape (free software) and then output to a very small PDF.

My notes on making nice lines, more details, and the script is on the linked page.

You can, more generally, hand-craft a single SVG object for one stave and produce a more optimal (small!) PDF file. But creating it in Inkscape is easy and good enough for most people. Then use that object (cloned for each answer blank) and text typed in Inkscape for your page.

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@Megan533

Use InDesign and use illustrator if you wish to draw complicated illustrations in the paper. InDesign will give you complete control over the output pdf. You can control everything about the output pdf. and you can also have left and right pages side by side.

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@Si6392903

I would do that in Word itself.


Left and right pages (Checked)
Template for the background (your design) (Checked)
Math formulas (Checked)


In case you need a really complex one that you can not write inside Word you could write somewhere else and copy paste inside Word.


Print as PDF. You simply print a file to Mircosoft to PDF virtual printer. If you do not have it, you can use a free one like PDF creator on Windows.


And you can simply prepare some preformatted styles for some types of equations, so you assign font and size with one click.

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@Sherry646

LaTeX is meant exactly for stuff like this. LaTeX is a programming language of sorts, designed with the explicit purpose of typesetting documents... like, say, an essay template. It spits out nice, vectorized PDFs across Windows, OSX, and Linux, and it's also possible to define your own custom formats and commands.

There's a wealth of documentation available online, which enables even complete beginners to get up and running pretty quickly. Services like ShareLaTeX allow collaboration and versioning, as well as including features that users of word processors take for granted (e.g. a spell checker).

And, just as a fun example, the output from a bit of LaTeX "code". The snippet $frac{1}{z} = frac{z^*}{x^2 + y^2}$ yields this:



Which you might recognize as the equation in the example exam page. Oh, and when rendered as a PDF, even the math stuff comes out as copy-able text (though, depending on where you're copying to, results may vary).

There's also a TeX/LaTeX StackExchange site for your more advanced questions. Like, say, how to typeset an exam paper. (Thanks @Gallifreyan !)

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@Sarah814

As some people mentioned before, it would be great and highly recommended to use Adobe InDesign to create something like that. The result will be much lighter than Adobe Photoshop (for the PDF file size). But, you can do it more easy by using your Microsoft Word to export as PDF. You can do it by click File - Save As - and then choose PDF format.

In case if you don't see the option, you need to install any PDF software. From my own experience, I love to use Foxit PhantomPDF rather than Adobe Acrobat. But, it's up to you.

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@Shanna688

Photoshop is probably the last choice for this type of work.

InDesign could work better as it can natively create a 'facing pages' document, meaning left & right page templates and yes with the proper formatting everything can be vector in your template which will result in minimal file size.

Since you appear to also need to typeset math into your documents that means installing a third party plugin, of which several are available, just google 'indesign math plugin' and see which one works for you.

Scribus or LaTeX are other free alternatives as others have explained already in more detail.

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