Modernize default card templates for readability: revised proposal and technical details

[dae]

Responding to your reply on the other previous thread first:

@guillerless

@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.

For shorter texts/smaller photos, and for wider windows, I think it can end up looking worse than what we currently have.

I don’t have data on how many Anki users create longer cards vs shorter ones. If it were heavily skewed in one direction, that might be an argument for the change. I suspect it’s a bit more balanced than that, but I’m not sure.

One other thing I should note is that we encourage users to stick to the minimum information principle, and such minimal cards tend to look better when centered.

@guillerless

@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.

This would leave users who want large images to either use a shared deck, or to figure out the margin/padding settings, which is not ideal.

@guillerless

The font stack above ensures each device uses its native system font:

While not something I feel particularly strongly about, I should note that I originally picked Arial because it or its fallback looked fairly similar across the various platforms.

Spitballing: maybe platform selectors could be used to make it clearer why multiple fonts are listed? e.g.

.card {
   ...
}

.win        .card { font-family: "Segoe UI" }
.mac        .card { font-family: BlinkMacSystemFont }
.linux      .card { font-family: sans-serif; }
.ios        .card { font-family: -apple-system }