Turn my simple project into an add-on

Hello folks!

I’m a brand new Anki user. I am totally naive about Anki development and all of its add-ons, but I am really enthusiastic about Python package development, Robotic Process Automation, web scraping, and the English language, which bring me to this forum.

When I found out Anki, I got amazed. However, I missed a lot of a procedure that creates my English cards automatically. Despite Anki is widely used for people who would like to improve their language skills, I didn’t find any add-on that fits my requirements. So I decided to create on my own!

Unfortunately, My lack of experient with widget toolkits prevented me from creating the add-on itself. As a workaround, I jumped into RPA to make the cards. It has been working like a charm to me. I created a video showing how it works (sorry for my not good English yet ): )

That said, my proposal is: If you are familiar with Qt for Python, fork my project, use my web scrapping, and then make a pull request in order to turn clac into an add-on :blush:.

Github link

Hey, good morning.

I’m not sure I understand your idea, could you please clarify?

Of course, Let me put my project across:

CLAC (stand for Cards Language with Audio/examples from Collins dictionary) is a project that creates language card on Anki automatically. For instance, If you don’t know the meaning of the word “delve”, you can use CLAC to look it up and create a card with the meaning of that word, in addition to sentence examples, if you want. To do so, CLAC executes two tasks:

  1. Web scrapping: It consists of parsing a website in order to gather data. These data are text (the meaning and the examples) and audio (from the examples), which are extracted from Collins Dictionary.
  2. RPA (Robotic Process Automation): When CLAC parses the website and gather the information. I created an RPA that takes over my computer and start the card creation using these data (see my video if you have any question).

That said, my idea is that someone who is experienced in creating add-ons on Anki can exploit the webscraping to create an add-on that builds this card, without using an RPA as I am doing.

Can’t you just put the scrapped data into a CSV file and import it to Anki?

Yes, or I could have a wonderful add-on that receives a word as input and creates a fancy card without requiring CSV or whatever. That approach would be effortless.

I dont understand. Are you talking about an addon that keeps constantly checking scrapped data and automatically turns this content into anki cards?

My Add-on proposal is very simple:

  1. When the Add-on is used, one window pops up requiring one word.
  2. When we enter the word, the add-on creates a card automatically. This card should have the same structure shown in my video.

Just that. But if you have other suggestions, just let me know.

Hi tapyu, you are contributing something to the Anki ecosystem and that’s great. From my experience, it’s very unlikely that someone will out of the blue take your code and convert it into an anki addon. If you want to see this happen, likely the only way is for you to learn PyQt and Anki internals and start writing code. It’s not as complicated as it seems.

1 Like

Thank you so much for your answer. Actually, I don’t have high expectations about it, but trying is better than nothing hahahaha Regarding PyQt, I’m not really interested in learning it, to be honest. I am more into the “backend” of this project (that is, RPA and webscraping). Therefore, I need to find someone who is up to work on the GUI. Anyway, sadbates has demonstrated interest, if you has interest too, just send me a message on private, we can talk on Discord.

PS: I know that PyQt is not so difficult as it looks like, but the Anki’s internals came across rather cumbersome :frowning: