Yeah. I prefer left-aligned for these cards too, in part because you always start reading from the same place. But it will look unbalanced in the window, and I know some other users will agree with you.
I definitely agree this sort of thing can’t be resolved by anything like an up or down vote. But I’ll note that over 99% of the English text we read, on the screen and in life, is left-aligned.
I’m sympathetic to both these approaches. But I’m definitely trying to find room for a solution that respects sorata’s concern here.
All significant drawbacks to the new approach.
- I know not everybody will like it, but if you look at the actual styles pictured below, I still prefer the new one.
- This is a use case I need to think about more. I don’t have a good answer here.
- The increased padding is pretty small, but the new styling will definitely fit less text on the screen at a time.
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Yep–but these are HUGE changes. The ones above are minimal.
I’ve posted some other comments on the other thread you created:
Responding to the points you made in your initial screenshot:
- 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.
- 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.
- Limiting horizontal width is going to upset users who want to see images taking up the full space, such as large image occlusions.
- A list of fallback fonts makes it a bit more complicated for inexperienced users to change.
- 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.
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.
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For what it’s worth, I much prefer centered for simple cards. For anything more complicated, e.g., a list, I prefer left-justified, and to do that I roll my own.
That said, I do have a bunch of wall-of-text cards that could definitely benefit from more thoughtful formatting than I have so far applied, not out of laziness, but from a lack of familiarity with CSS.
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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:
Sure, but start-aligned works fine for short texts, whereas center-aligned can make longer texts nearly unreadable.
Yeah—on second thought I’d make it smaller.
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.
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.)
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.]
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I’ve clarified and updated the proposal on a new post. (I wasn’t able to edit this one?) Let me know whether you think I’ve solved your issues or found a good balance!
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I’d just want to add as an FYI that some note types increase size of images upon hovered.
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