Hi,

I have recently done some development on a new LaTeX packages and
classes. There has also been work in different areas (thanks to Henry
Menke). So far I have focused on the low level infrastructure for
typsetting text- and checkboxes, while Henry contributed mechanisms for
complex question layouts (not yet included).

The new code is available at http://github.com/sdaps/sdaps-class for
now. Internally it uses LaTeX 3 (which is really nice). If you like to
test it grab the source and run "make". This will build sdapsbase.sty,
the documentation (incomplete) and the test document.

In the new code the general layout infrastructure will be split from the
question layout and main class. This will make it a lot easier to create
custom layouts or even create a custom class for SDAPS.

Cool new stuff:
      * Overlays! You can overlay anything on top of checkboxes and
        textboxes. Included overlays will be PDF forms, custom text,
        checkbox drawing, ...
      * A flag management system. You could pre-fill a (PDF) form using
        the Questionnaire-ID for example.
      * Place a textbox around a normal LaTeX horizontal or vertical
        box.
      * More robust vertical stretching
      * A context management system to manage hierarchy (think about
        matrix layouts, sections, ...)

It is all still in a very early development stage, and some parts will
likely require redesigns. A lot of things are not even hooked up
correctly internally yet (e.g. textboxes are not configurable).

Note that it probably only makes sense to look at this if you are
interested in layout issues and package/class development itself. The
user visible interface is not yet in a state where it can be reviewed
properly.

Benjamin

PS: My test document: http://sdaps.org/misc/latex3-test.pdf
 * checkboxes modified based on Questionnaire-ID and name (top)
 * Different checkbox overlays enabled, including PDF forms
 * Textboxes placed around text ("coffin" is the LaTeX3 construct used)
 * scaling textboxes (pages 2 and 3 show some layout scenarios)

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