Modernize default card template for readability and simplicity

[guillerless]

Thanks for the great feedback—sorry I missed this the first time around.

In short, I agree that everything you list is a potential drawback, but don’t think there’s a good balance of priorities right now. For instance:

@dae

As others have pointed out, whether start-aligned or center-aligned is more appropriate tends to depend on the amount of material people are putting on their cards.

Sure, but start-aligned works fine for short texts, whereas center-aligned can make longer texts nearly unreadable.

@dae

I feel like you’ve picked a window height that is favourable to the top padding you’ve chosen. In a shorter or longer window, it’s going to look more unbalanced. And the increased padding will mean less can be shown on small screens by default.

Yeah—on second thought I’d make it smaller.

@dae

Limiting horizontal width is going to upset users who want to see images taking up the full space, such as large image occlusions.

I don’t have a good solution to this. I’m afraid image styling outside the user-editable CSS would break existing cards. But I note that a key use case for large images—med students’ studying—is mainly done through premade decks that these changes wouldn’t affect.

@dae

Line height and hr styling are comparatively obscure, so we could potentially tweak these in implicit styling not included in the template, if we have a way to avoid breaking existing templates.

Definitely agree about the hr. I think line height could go behind the scenes too, but I’m less confident that it won’t negatively affect existing note types. (Though it looks like AnkiMobile already has its own line height.)

@dae

One possible way to avoid the wall-of-text issue would be to move some of these customizations into a configurable “base style” that notetypes can be set to (such as “basic” and “modern”), but it would mean the user-editable styling section is less self-documenting, or would need to be commented out so it doesn’t override the base style.

I think a configurable base style would be great! In keeping with Anki’s mostly minimalist design (and not being an app developer) I’ve tried to find the simplest possible solution—but maybe a less simple solution is better.

[Edited, 1/22/25, for clarity.]