These templates should replace Anki’s default templates; as it’s hard to read centrally aligned text imo, makes Anki look much more outdated than it is, copy-pasting images leads to oversized images, and also obviously not very pleasing to look at. This will also make Anki more likeable for beginners.
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I like creating cool templates like these, but incorporating graphical elements causes bugs,
because each device has a bit different way of displaying.
Win, Mac, Linux, iphone, Android ,AnkiWeb, new Qt…
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I like the idea, but these cards had problem on Mac/IOS in the bottom border
If someone is interested in making a PR, then we can resume this discussion
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Anki’s default templates are deliberately simple. It makes them less daunting to customize, and there’s less that can go wrong due to platform differences.
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People don’t customize cards by default, having a modern looking card will improve people perception about Anki
Advanced users, capable of using HTML, CSS and JS, will always be able to change their cards to their liking
anki-prettify/res/images/prettify-cover.png at main · pranavdeshai/anki-prettify · GitHub
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Yes, if someone likes those templates, they could install them. I like simple templates as the starting point.
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We have
Basic
Cloze
we can just change them to:
Simple Basic
Simple Cloze
This way, the user who wants to try HTML and CSS can use Anki simple card to customize without being daunting
Not many people download templates to use them, especially non English people, since they don’t search for “template” or “note type”
Not sure how to handle the Basic Variations (Reversed and Type:)
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Simple Basic sounds weird, it’s either Simple or Basic. Let’s keep things as they are, no need to change all this. Sometimes simple CSS is better than over-complex CSS settings that might break.
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Another thing to bear in mind is that we can’t deploy fixes to templates to users who’ve already got them in their collection. If some fancy formatting breaks in a platform update, it’s a pain for users to update their notetypes with the fix.
I sometimes think that such fancy themes would be better served by an add-on like system, where themes could be downloaded and automatically updated. Currently deck authors push their preferences on their users, which makes for a lot of headaches when they’re deficient in some way. If shared deck styling focused on the basic layout of the fields, and left the borders/backgrounds/etc to such themes, it might make for a better experience. Not sure if it would work though - deck authors may want to retain styling control (which perhaps could be partly addressed by a ‘recommended theme’ feature), and themes being field-agnostic may not always work. It would also be a sizeable amount of work to implement.
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What if we add a button in Note Type > Add Note Type called Get/Add/Install Templates which redirects users to (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=Template)
Sure there will be templates that will be missing for this search, but the majority would be there
Docs changes:
- Adding a Note Type: To download templates navigate to
Tools > Manage Note Type > Add > Get Templates - Sharing Decks Publicly: For template deck authors, please ensure that the “Template” is included in your “Title” or “Description” when sharing.
Positives
- Users will use shared decks more often for searching/testing newer templates
- Might boost template deck authors to create more creative note types
Negatives
- No deck/template update
- AnKing Note Types (Easy Customization), Flexible cloze 2, Enhanced Cloze (for Anki 2.1) updates their own note type, maybe we can have a deck/template checker add-on (or native), which will see if the note type has updates or not
- Increases Add Note Type window size
- Need to add the button in AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile
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The problem is those templates are not just styling, but also a list of fields. That makes it difficult for users to switch between different templates when experimenting or when they run into issues, which a dedicated theme feature would allow. While linking to that page would partly address the stated goals, I’m not sure it’s worth doing as a temporary measure.
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I see five votes against (four plus my vote) and 1½ in favor. After thirty years in software engineering (10+ doing web work), I can assure you that the further one strays from the K.I.S.S. principle, the more likely the result is NOT portable. The purpose of Anki is to present/study information, not eye candy.
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I am reminded of this reply to this website.
While professional developers are comfortable with terminals, command line interfaces, and reading manuals for software, for a vast majority of people such software is not just unusable but also repulsive and ugly.
My suggestion wasn’t that we have to use Prettify templates, just that for new users by default, some other slightly-nicer but still bare-bones template would make Anki more friendly for new users, while the current default would still be there for legacy or developer reasons.
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Hey everyone, I’ve just signed up for the Anki Forums to support @Sqrt-1 in his point.
While I do see that simple templates help portability, I believe two small fixes could greatly improve the default experience:
- Give the card content a maximum width
- Left-align (or right for RTL) the text
The prettify cards might already be overkill (e.g. the zoom feature for the images).
The default template does not need to be particularly fancy. However, I believe the current setup actively hinders readability and accessibility.
2 Likes