Sporadic markup on AnkiDroid with formatting inserted that are not on Anki Desktop

AnkiDroid (Android) Help
1

My issue seems similar to a reddit thread entitled

Ankidroid synced cards are putting all my answers with a white background - > how to fix?

One day several months ago, many of my cards began showing up with strange text coloration or strange background highlighting, but only on AnkiDroid. I don’t think this is related to color inversion being removed because it only occurs on some cards, it is sporadic, and I see hard-coded objects in the cards on ankiDroid but not on anki desktop.

These objects show up regardless of whether I’m in a light room or dark room, and changing Theme to “plain” does not change anything.

I have 5100 cards in my main deck, using two different templates. All the cards function as expected on Anki desktop.

On Ankidroid, a (seemingly random) set of cards began to misbehave at some point. I noticed it one day when cards were working as expected earlier. There are about. There were 350-400 such cards.

In many cases, some or all of the text is shown a color that makes it practically impossible to read against the black background. When I go to edit the note in anki-droid I see things like this:`

<span style="color: rgb(44, 45, 48);">Az emberek azt hiszik, hogy az ügyvédek gazdagok, de akkor is kevesebbet ____ , mint a pilóták.</span>

But in Anki Desktop I don’t see any markup. Just:

Az emberek azt hiszik, hogy az ügyvédek gazdagok, de ___ _ kevesebbet keresnek, mint a pilóták.

Sometimes it is just a subset of the words, not the entire text. Sometimes it is background color instead of text.

The template for these cards has no special text color in the main portion (the red part in the template below is unrelated):

{{Front (Example with word blanked out or missing)}}<br><br>

<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px;'>{{Front (Picture)}}</div>
<br>
<div style='font-family: Arial; font-size: 20px;color:red'>{{Front (Definitions, base word, etc.)}}</div>

I don’t see how the card data can be different between the two if the cards are sync’d.

Any help is appreciated.

Debug info below:

AnkiDroid Version = 2.20.1 (e32a82c33646807ea19623c9c88be38965bc07e6)

Backend Version = 0.1.48-anki24.11 (24.11 c47638ca36f99dd4f3b81ae82d964aec66e392e0)

Android Version = 15 (SDK 35)

ProductFlavor = play

Manufacturer = Google

Model = Pixel 8a

Hardware = akita

Webview User Agent = Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 15; Pixel 8a Build/AP4A.241205.013.C1; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/131.0.6778.200 Mobile Safari/537.36

ACRA UUID = 3abe9f4c-a66e-4235-aad7-64e75c039327

FSRS = 1.4.3 (Enabled: false)

Crash Reports Enabled = true
2

Can you show a screenshot of the cards where you see these colours/artifacts?

Are you looking at the underlying HTML by clicking <>?

3

Nope!
Thanks!
So it looks like the html may have carried over from a copy and paste from certain web applications.

It seems like this should be relatively easy to fix by pasting each one into notepad and then pasting back into Anki Desktop.

Is there a way to get anki to paste as plain text?
I tried CNTRL + shift + V, but it did not seem to work.

4

I think there is. Ref: Preferences - Anki Manual

Paste without Shift strips formatting
By default, formatting like bold and colors are kept when pasting, unless the Shift key is held down. This option reverses the behaviour.

5

Unfortunately, Pasting text is not stripping HTML, regardless of whether I hold down shift or not. I uplodated a screen shot showing what happens if I copy the text shown in Anki and just paste it back in as a new line. The are duplicated in the HTML

I think I have a couple of other solutions, though:

  • I could paste into notepad and then repaste into Anki, which should strip the HTML

  • I could also just set my ankidroid theme to Light/Plain to match Anki Desktop

  • I could also prefix the field replacement strings with "text: " which should strip the html.

simple_paste_anki
simple_paste_anki2550×394 86.7 KB

6

If you paste directly into the field where you can see the html code in Anki Desktop (the one that appears when you click <>), the formatting will also be stripped. ALL formatting, so if there are line breaks you want to preserve, you need to go over the “normal” field and hit enter at the appropriate places.