One-to-Many Card Generation

Anki Card Design
1

Background
A book I am currently studying has many Chapters and and each Chapter has many key pieces of information. Some chapters may have 3 pieces of information, some may have 10 pieces etc..
e.g.
Book
    Chapter#1
      InformationPiece#1
      InformationPiece#2
    Chapter#2
      InformationPiece#3
      InformationPiece#4
      InformationPiece#5
    …
    Chapter#N
        …

I am using Anki to help me remember the key pieces of information in the book, specifically, I need to remember -

  1. the key pieces of information in each chapter (preferably the order in which they come in as well). (E.g. “The key pieces of information in Chapter#1 are InformationPiece#1 and InformationPiece#2”)
  2. given a piece of information, which chapter does that specific piece come in (e.g. “InformationPiece#5 is discussed in Chapter#2”)

Current Solutions
An initial solution was to simple add an individual field for each piece of information.
Note

  • Chapter#Field=“…”
  • InformationPieceField#1=“…”
  • InformationPieceField#2=“…”
    …
  • InformationPieceField#M=“…”

And then simply create a create multiple cards as such

  • Card#1) Chapter#Field → InformationPieceField#1, InformationPieceField#2, …, InformationPieceField#M
  • Card#2) InformationPieceField#1 → Chapter#Field
  • Card#3) InformationPieceField#2 → Chapter#Field
  • …
  • Card#M+1) InformationPieceField#M → Chapter#Field

However, given that not all Chapters have M pieces of information, I would have to leave fields empty for some Chapters. This seems a rather inefficient solution.

I have also tried adding all information to a text piece and use cloze-deletion. E.g.
Text
"Chapter#2

  • InformationPiece#3
  • InformationPiece#4
  • InformationPiece#5"

However, when a card designed to test a single InformationPiece is created (i.e. it is deleted from the text), it inevitably shows the other InformationPieces in the Chapter, this is problem because I can deduce (rather than recall) the missing InformationPiece using the undeleted text.

Problem
Is it possible to better design a single note that is able to generate multiple cards that help me remember the book? If so, how?

Many thanks in advance.

2

How is this inefficient? Having empty fields is very normal. I have extra fields in all my note types just in case I want to add miscellaneous info on the back. Isn’t that much of an issue IMHO.

You can use Cloze Overlapper (the original is paid now, but AnkiWeb has forks that work).

There’s also Cloze Anything that works well.

So, what they allow you to do is have an active cloze and have inactive clozes just like Image Occlusion.

FYI, there is an issue about adding this functionality to Anki itself:

Hoping some hero dev appears and actually make this happen this one day…

3

While it might be normal to have empty fields it seems inefficient in the sense that if in the future I realise that a chapter has M+1 InformationPieces, I have to now change the note template to cater. I agree that this isn’t that big of a deal but, this problem felt too common to not have a better solution.

This seems like it would do what I require. However, I am on AnkiDroid so add ons won’t do for me. But I guess this is good for others out there with a similar problem to mine.

Many thanks.

4

Cloze Anything works much better if you’re on Android. However, I’ll add that Cloze Overlapper works on Android fine if you get the templates (editing those can be hard).

I have Cloze Anything with styling from Prettify Anki applied. In case it helps. Public Folder - Google Drive

5

@Pemafid I moved this to here: Template to Hide All Clozes while Testing on One