Future feature for answer key: multiple layers (+workarounds

[NisusUser]

Hi, Martin and all forum readers,

One thing I really miss in NWP is the ability to prepare one document with test questions and the answers, but print them separately, one for the teacher (the key) and one for the students. Is it possible to do that with .rtf files in general? If so, is there a chance NWP might add that feature some time? Other than InDesign, I don't know of any decent way to do it, and InDesign is overkill for that kind of thing. It seems that maybe I read some discussion here in the forums on this topic, but I can't find anything. I think some workarounds (such as hidden characters for the answers) were mentioned (that's not a workable workaround, IMO). Any other workarounds for this? Oh, maybe someone recommended having a file for the test questions only and then printing it to a PDF used as a watermark background for the answer key document and then going back and putting the answers over the PDF. But that's inconvenient, too, since it requires two files, and if you want to change one question, you must reprint the test to PDF in a different file.

Thanks!

[Hamid]

Enter the text of the questions in the Questions style and the text of the answers in the Reveal Answers style. To make the answers invisible, place the cursor anywhere in the Reveal Answers style and Select All from the Paragraph tag in the Statusbar. Then apply the Answers style. The text color of the Answers style is white. (To reveal the answers, reapply the Reveal Answers style). Here is a sample file.

Q&A.rtf

(21.43 KiB) Downloaded 313 times

[NisusUser]

Thank you, Hamid. I'm sure that's workable. I'll see. I appreciate your help!

[phspaelti]

In this case I think white color is probably the best choice to make things invisible (since it won't affect the spacing). But I recently found out another way to make invisible text is to use an "invisible font". An invisible font is a font where all characters display as 0 width. It works well. The only disconcerting aspect is that the name of the font will not display in the menus, and the same is true if you create a character style with this font applied.

[martin]

Here's a little macro that will automatically toggle all answers in the document between Hamid's two styles. As written it switches between the styles "Answers" and "Reveal Answers", but you can customize the style names in the macro very easily.