Intermittent problem displaying a text field in AnkiDroid that displays in desktop

AnkiDroid (Android) Help
1

I’m having a problem where the front card is not showing a text field in AnkiDroid, but the field is showing up fine in Anki for Mac desktop.

The maddening thing is that this is only happening intermittently.

I don’t think it’s a template issue where AnkiDroid is parsing the template differently than the Desktop version, because

  • it works in AnkiDroid for some cards with the same template, but not others.

And I don’t think it’s a data issue where I entered the data inappropriately, because

  • I checked the data for some of the cards that worked, and some that didn’t, and the field is correctly filled in on all of them
  • Also all the cards in both categories (working in AnkiDroid and not working in AnkiDroid) work correctly in the desktop version

Has anyone encountered this problem, and have any idea what might be causing it?

Here is the template for the front card (the intermittently missing field is {{Word}}. The {{Pronunciation (Recording and/or IPA)}} field is consistently displaying correctly, on both Anki for desktop and AnkiDroid):

<font color=blue>Guess the gender</font><br><br>

{{Word}}

{{#Pronunciation (Recording and/or IPA)}}<br><font color=blue>{{Pronunciation (Recording and/or IPA)}}</font>{{/Pronunciation (Recording and/or IPA)}}<br>

And here’s the debug info:

AnkiDroid Version = 2.20.1 (e32a82c33646807ea19623c9c88be38965bc07e6)

Backend Version = 0.1.48-anki24.11 (24.11 c47638ca36f99dd4f3b81ae82d964aec66e392e0)

Android Version = 15 (SDK 35)

ProductFlavor = play

Manufacturer = Google

Model = Pixel 6

Hardware = oriole

Webview User Agent = Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 15; Pixel 6 Build/AP4A.250205.002; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/133.0.6943.137 Mobile Safari/537.36

ACRA UUID = be7b477e-cc54-4859-86c7-dcd07f4b0862

FSRS = 1.4.3 (Enabled: true)

Crash Reports Enabled = true
2

Solved: This is a pretty similar issue to the recent forum post, “Sporadic markup on AnkiDroid with formatting inserted that are not on Anki Desktop”.

I was copying and pasting html (I think this was happening when I was copying from a pdf) instead of plain text into the word field, and the browser view doesn’t make that obvious by default; you have to click the “<>” button to show the code in the field.

One of the ones that was working:

Screenshot 2025-03-13 at 9.51.55 AM
Screenshot 2025-03-13 at 9.51.55 AM542×456 12.3 KB

One of the ones that wasn’t working:

Screenshot 2025-03-13 at 9.52.09 AM
Screenshot 2025-03-13 at 9.52.09 AM534×546 22.3 KB

The solution is 1) not to copy from a pdf, or 2) to copy into some program that strips the formatting, like Mac TextEdit with the formatting off, or VS Code, before recopying into Anki, or 3) to click on the ‘<>’ in Anki and then paste, as described in a comment on the recent forum post above.

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3

Ref: Sporadic markup on AnkiDroid with formatting inserted that are not on Anki Desktop

Ctrl Shift V to strip formatting on the original paste also generally helps (despite the other user’s claim that it wouldn’t).

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4

Oh interesting; I’ll try that.

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5

Incidentally this problem occurs both when copying from pdfs and when copying from Apple Numbers (and I’m guessing Excel and Google Sheets too).

6

Well, this would happen from any place with allows you to copy html formatting along with the copied text. What is going on behind the scenes is when you’re copying, the html and the text you see both are being copied, and if the place you are pasting it supports html formatting, it gets pasted with the formatting if you Ctrl + V (Cmd + V on Mac), and the formatting is removed if you paste it with Ctrl + Shift + V (Cmd + Shift + V on Mac).

Oh, and if it is already there in your field, you don’t need to go to some other software to get rid of the formatting, you can directly use the eraser button.

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