manual.txt

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
<h1>Anki 2.0 User Manual</h1>

<script>
    document.getElementById("navmanual").className += " active";
</script>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Intro Videos
============

 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS2G-k2hQyg&feature=plcp[Shared decks and review basics]
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnbKwHEQ1mA[Switching Card Order]
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1j1Zx0mXME[Styling Cards]
 * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tYObQ3ocrw[Typing in the Answer]

Translations
============

This page translated into other languages:

 * http://192.167.9.6/Anki_ITA/Manual_ITA.htm[Italiano]
 * http://wikiwiki.jp/rage2050/?FrontPage[日本語]
    
Introduction
============

:website: http://ankisrs.net/[Anki website]
:ankiweb: https://ankiweb.net/

Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot
more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease
your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki.
Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific
markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:

 - learning a language
 - studying for medical and law exams
 - memorizing people's names and faces
 - brushing up on geography
 - mastering long poems
 - even practicing guitar chords!

There are two simple concepts behind Anki: 'active recall testing' and 'spaced
repetition'. They are not known to most learners, despite having been written
about in the scientific literature for many years. Understanding how they work
will make you a more effective learner.

[[active-recall]]
Active Recall Testing
---------------------

'Active recall testing' means being asked a question and trying to remember
the answer. This is in contrast to 'passive study', where we read, watch or
listen to something without pausing to consider if we know the answer.
Research has shown that active recall testing is far more effective at
building strong memories than passive study. There are two reasons for this:

 - The act of recalling something 'strengthens' the memory, increasing the
   chances we'll be able to remember it again
 - When we're unable to answer a question, it tells us we need to return to
   the material to review or relearn it

You have probably encountered active recall testing in your school years
without even realizing it. When good teachers give you a series of questions
to answer after reading an article, or make you take weekly progress-check
tests, they are not doing it simply to see if you understood the material or
not. By testing you, they are increasing the chances you will be able to
remember the material in the future.

A good way to integrate active recall testing into your own studies is to use
'flashcards'. With traditional paper flashcards, you write a question on one
side of a card, and the answer on the other side. By not turning the card over
until you've thought about the answer, you can learn things more
effectively than passive observation allows.

Use It or Lose It
------------------

Our brains are efficient machines, and they rapidly discard information that
doesn't seem useful. Chances are that you don't remember what you had for
dinner on Monday two weeks ago, because this information is not usually
useful. If you went to a fantastic restaurant that day and spent the last two
weeks telling people about how great it was, however, you're likely to still
remember in vivid detail.

The brain's "use it or lose it" policy applies to everything we learn. If you
spend an afternoon memorizing some science terms, and then don't think about
that material for two weeks, you'll probably have forgotten most of it. In
fact, studies show we forget about 75% of material learnt within a 48 hour
period. This can seem pretty depressing when you need to learn a lot of
information.

The solution is simple, however: 'review'. By reviewing newly-learnt
information, we can greatly reduce forgetting.

The only problem is that traditionally review was not very practical. If you
are using paper flashcards, it's easy to flick through all of them if you only
have 30 of them to review, but as the number grows to 300 or 3000, it quickly
becomes unwieldy.

[[spaced-repetition]]
Spaced Repetition
-----------------

The 'spacing effect' was reported by a German psychologist in 1885. He
observed that we tend to remember things more effectively if we spread reviews
out over time, instead of studying multiple times in one session. Since the
1930s there have been a number of proposals for utilizing the spacing effect
to improve learning, in what has come to be called 'spaced repetition'.

One example is in 1972, when a German scientist called Sebastian Leitner
popularized a method of spaced repetition with paper flashcards. By separating
the paper cards up into a series of boxes, and moving the cards to a different
box on each successful or unsuccessful review, it was possible to see at a
glance a rough estimate of how well a card was known and when it should be
reviewed again. This was a great improvement over a single box of cards, and
it has been widely adopted by computerized flashcard software. It is a rather
rough approach however, as it can't give you an exact date on which you should
review something again, and it doesn't cope very well with material of varying
difficulty.

The biggest developments in the last 30 years have come from the authors of
SuperMemo, a commercial flashcard program that implements spaced repetition.
SuperMemo pioneered the concept of a system that keeps track of the ideal time
to review material and optimizes itself based on the performance of
the user.

In SuperMemo's spaced repetition system, every time you answer a question, you
tell the program how well you were able to remember it - whether you forgot
completely, made a small mistake, remembered with trouble, remembered easily,
etc. The program uses this feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the
question again. Since a memory gets stronger each time you successfully recall
it, the time between reviews gets bigger and bigger - so you may see a
question for the first time, then 3 days later, 15 days later, 45 days later,
and so on.

This was a revolution in learning, as it meant material could be learnt and
retained with the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary. SuperMemo's
slogan sums it up: with spaced repetition, you can 'forget about forgetting'.

Why Anki?
---------

While there is no denying the huge impact SuperMemo has had on the field, it
is not without its problems. The program is often criticized for being buggy
and difficult to navigate. It only runs on Windows computers. It's proprietary
software, meaning end-users can't extend it or access the raw data. And while
very old versions are made available for free, they are quite limited for
modern use.

Anki addresses these issues. There are free clients for Anki available on many
platforms, so struggling students and teachers with budgetary constraints are
not left out. It's open source, with an already flourishing library of add-ons
contributed by end-users. It's multi-platform, running on Windows, Mac OSX,
Linux/FreeBSD, and some mobile devices. And it's considerably easier to use
than SuperMemo.

Internally, Anki's spaced repetition system is based on an older version of
the SuperMemo algorithm called SM2. Subsequent versions have managed to
squeeze out a little more learning efficiency, but they come at the cost of
greatly increased complexity, and they are more susceptible to scheduling
errors in real-world use. For a more in-depth discussion of this and the
differences in scheduling algorithms, see the bottom of the page.

[[basics]]
The Basics
==========

Cards
-----

A question and answer pair is called a 'card'. This is based on a paper
flashcard with a question on one side an the answer on the back. In Anki a
card doesn't actually look like a physical card, and when you show the answer
the question remains visible by default. For example, if you're studying basic
chemistry, you might see a question like:

-----
Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?
-----

After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click the show
answer button, and Anki shows you:

-----
Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?
A: O
-----

After checking you are correct, you can tell Anki how well you remembered, and
Anki will choose a next time to show you again.

Decks
-----

A 'deck' is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks to study
parts of your card collection instead of studying everything at once. Each
deck can have different settings, such as how many new cards to show each day,
or how long to wait until cards are shown again.

Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into a tree.
Anki uses "::" to show different levels. A deck called "Chinese::Hanzi" refers
to a "Hanzi" deck, which is part of a "Chinese" deck. If you select "Hanzi"
then only the Hanzi cards will be shown; if you select "Chinese" then all
Chinese cards, including Hanzi cards, will be shown.

To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with "::" between each level,
or drag and drop them from the deck list.

Anki starts with a deck called "default"; any cards which have somehow become
separated from other decks will go here. Anki will hide the default deck if it
contains no cards and you have added other decks.  Alternatively, you may rename
this deck and use it for other cards.

Decks are best used to hold broad categories of cards, rather than specific
topics such as "food verbs" or "lesson 1". For more info on this, please see
the <<manydecks,using decks appropriately>> section.

For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in, please
see <<displayorder,display order>> section.

Notes & Fields
---------------

When making flashcards, it's often desirable to make more than one card that
relates to some information. For example, if you're learning French, and you
learn that the word "bonjour" means "hello", you may wish to create one card
that shows you "bonjour" and asks you to remember "hello", and another card
that shows you "hello" and asks you to remember "bonjour". One card is testing
your ability to recognize the foreign word, and the other card is testing your
ability to produce it.

When using paper flashcards, your only option in this case is to write out the
information twice, once for each card. Some computer flashcard programs make
life easier by providing a feature to flip the front and back sides. This is
an improvement over the paper situation, but there are two major downsides:

 * Because such programs don't track your performance of recognition and
 production separately, cards will tend not to be shown to you at the optimum
 time, meaning you forget more than you'd like, or you study more than is
 necessary.
 * Reversing the question and answer only works when you want exactly the same
 content on each side. This means it's not possible to display extra info on the
 back of each card for example.

Anki solves these problems by allowing you to split the content of your cards
up into separate pieces of information. You can then tell Anki which pieces of
information you want on each card, and Anki will take care of creating the
cards for you, and updating them if you make any edits in the future.

Imagine we want to study French vocabulary, and we want to include the page
number on the back of each cards. We want our cards to look like this:
like this:

-----
Q: Bonjour
A: Hello
   Page #12
-----

And:

-----
Q: Hello
A: Bonjour
   Page #12
-----

In this example, we have three pieces of related information: a French word,
an English meaning, and a page number. If we put them together, they'd look
like this:

-----
French: Bonjour
English: Hello
Page: 12
-----

In Anki, this related information is called a 'note', and each piece of
information is called a 'field'. So we can say that this type of note has
three fields: French, English and Page.

Card Templates
--------------

In order for Anki to create cards based on our notes, we need to give it a
blueprint that says which fields should be displayed on the front or back of
each card. This blueprint is called a 'card template'. Different types of
notes can have different templates.

In the above French example, we wanted the recognition card to look like this:

-----
Q: Bonjour
A: Hello
   Page #12
-----

To do this, we can set the template question and answer to:

-----
Q: {{French}}
A: {{English}}<br>
   Page #{{Page}}
-----

By surrounding a field name in curly brackets, we tell Anki to replace that
section with the actual information in the field. The information not
surrounded by curly brackets remains the same on each card.

The <br> is a special code that tells Anki to move to the next line. More
information is available in the Cards & Templates section.

Notice how we don't have to type "Page #" when adding material - it's added
automatically to every card.

The production card template is created in a similar way:

-----
Q: {{English}}
A: {{French}}<br>
   Page #{{Page}}
-----

Once a card template has been created, every time you add a new note, a card
will be created based on that template. Templates make it easy to keep the
formatting of your cards consistent, and can greatly reduce the amount of
effort involved in adding information. They also mean Anki can ensure related
cards don't appear too close to each other, and mean you can fix a typing
mistake once and have all the related cards updated at once.

To add and edit card templates, click the "Cards..." button while adding or
editing notes.

Note Types
----------

Anki allows you to create different types of notes for different material.
Each type of note has its own set of fields and card templates. It's a good
idea to create a separate note type for each broad topic you're studying. In
the above French example, we might create a note type called "French" for
that. If we wanted to learn capitals cities, we could create a separate note
type for that as well, with fields such as "Country" and "Capital City".

When Anki checks for duplicates, it only compares other notes of the same
type. Thus if you add a capital city called "Orange" using the capital city
note type, you won't see a duplicate message when it comes time to learn how
to say "orange" in French.

When you create a new collection, Anki automatically adds some standard note
types to it. These note types are provided to make Anki easier for new users,
but in the long run it's recommended you define your own note types for the
content you are learning. The standard note types are as follows:

 Basic :: Has Front and Back fields, and will create one card. Text you
 entered in Front will appear on the front of the card, and text you entered
 in Back will appear on the back of the card.

 Basic (and reversed card) :: Creates two cards for the text you enter: one
 from front->back and one from back->front.

 Basic (optional reversed card) :: This a front->back card, and optionally a
 back->front card. To do this, it has a third field called "Add Reverse". If
 you enter any text into that field, a reverse card will be created. More
 information about this is available in the Cards & Templates section.

 Cloze :: A note type which makes it easy to select text and turn it into a
 cloze deletion (eg "Man landed on the moon in [...]" -> "Man landed on the
 moon in [1969]"). More information is available in later sections.

To add your own note types and modify existing ones, you can use Tools>Manage
Note Types.

Collection
-----------

Your collection is all the material stored in Anki - your cards, notes, decks,
templates, and so on.

Adding Material
================

Downloading Shared Decks
-------------------------

The easiest way to get started with Anki is to download a deck of cards
someone has shared.

 1. Open Anki, and click the "Get Shared" button at the bottom of the deck list.
 2. When you've found a deck you're interested in, click the "Download" button
    to download a deck package.
 3. Double-click on the downloaded package to load it into Anki, or
    File>Import it.

Please note that it's not currently possible to add shared decks directly to
your AnkiWeb account. You need to import them with the desktop program, then
synchronize to upload them to AnkiWeb.

Please see <<sharingdecks,sharing decks>> for info on sharing your decks with
others.

.Self-made versus pre-made
**********************************************************************

Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complex subject.
Subjects like languages and the sciences can't be understood simply by
memorizing facts - they require explanation and context to learn effectively.
Furthermore, inputting the information yourself forces you to decide what the
key points are, and leads to a better understanding.

If you are a language learner you may be tempted to download a long list of
words and their translations, but this won't teach you a language any more
than memorizing scientific equations will teach you astrophysics. To learn
properly, you need textbooks, teachers, or exposure to real-world sentences.

 Do not learn if you do not understand.
 -- SuperMemo

Most shared decks are created by people who are learning material outside of
Anki - from textbooks, classes, TV, etc. They select the interesting points
from what they learn and put them into Anki. They make no effort to add
background information or explanations to the cards, because they already
understand the material. So when someone else downloads their deck and tries
to use it, they'll find it very difficult as the background information and
explanations are missing.

That is not to say shared decks are useless - simply that for complex
subjects, they should be used as a 'supplement' to external material, not as a
'replacement' for it. If you're studying textbook ABC and someone has shared a
deck of ideas from ABC, that's a great way to save some time. And for simple
subjects that are basically a list of facts, such as capital city names or pub
quiz trivia, you probably don't need external material. But if you attempt to
study complex subjects without external material, you will probably meet with
disappointing results.
**********************************************************************

[[addingnotes]]
Adding Cards and Notes
-----------------------

Recall from the <<basics,basics>> that in Anki we add notes rather than cards,
and Anki creates cards for us. Click 'Add' in the main window, and the Add
Notes window will appear.

The top left of the window shows us the current note type. If it does
not say "Basic", then you may have added some note types when you downloaded a
shared deck. The text below assumes that "Basic" is selected.

The top right of the window shows us the deck cards will be added to. If you'd
like to add cards to a new deck, you can click on the deck name button and
then click "Add".

Below the note type, you'll see some buttons, and an area labeled "Front" and
"Back". Front and Back are called 'fields', and you can add, remove and
rename them by clicking the "Fields..." button above.

Below the fields is another area labelled "Tags". Tags are labels that you can
attach to your notes, to make organizing and finding notes easier. You can
leave the tags blank if you wish, or add one or more of them. Tags are
separated by a space. If the tags area says

 vocab check_with_tutor

...then the note you add would have two tags.

When you've entered text into the front and back, you can click the "Add"
button or press Ctrl+Enter (Command+Enter on a Mac) to add the note to your
collection. When you do so, a card will be created as well, and placed into the
deck you chose. If you'd like to edit a card you added, you can click the
history button to search for a recently added card in the browser. (The browser
is a separate window that allows you to look at, search for, and modify cards
in your collection.)

Anki checks the first field for uniqueness, so it will warn you if you enter
two cards with a Front field of "apple" (for example). The uniqueness check is
limited to the current note type, so if you're studying multiple languages, two
cards with the same Front would not be listed as duplicates as long as you had
a different note type for each language.

Anki doesn't check for duplicates in other fields automatically for efficiency
reasons, but the browser has a "Find Duplicates" function which you can run
periodically.

For more information on the buttons between the note type and the fields,
please see the <<editor,editor>> section.

.Best Practices
**********************************************************************
Different people like to review in different ways, but there are some general
concepts to keep in mind. An excellent introduction is
http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm[this article] on the
SuperMemo site. In particular:

 * *Keep it simple* The shorter your cards, the easier they are to review. You
    may be tempted to include lots of information 'just in case', but reviews
    will quickly become painful.

 * *Don't memorize without understanding* If you're studying a language, try
    to avoid large lists of words. The best way to learn languages is in
    context, which means seeing those words used in a sentence. Likewise,
    imagine you're studying a computer course. If you attempt to memorize the
    mountain of acronyms, you'll find it very difficult to make progress. But
    if you take the time to understand the concepts behind the acronyms,
    learning the acronyms will become a lot easier.
**********************************************************************

[[notetypes]]
Adding a Note Type
-------------------

While basic notes are sufficient for simple cards with only a word or phrase
on each side, as soon as you find yourself wanting to include more than one
piece of information on the front or back, it's better to split that
information up into more fields.

You may find yourself thinking "but I only want one card, so why can't I just
include the audio, a picture, a hint and the translation in the Front field?"
If you'd prefer to do that, that's fine. But the disadvantage of that approach
is that all the information is stuck together. If you wanted to sort your
cards by the hint, you wouldn't be able to do that as it's mixed in with the
other content. You also wouldn't be able to do things like move the audio from
the front to the back, except by laboriously copying and pasting it for every
note. By keeping content in separate fields, it makes it much easier to adjust
the layout of your cards in the future.

To create a new type of note, in the Add window, click on the button next to
"type", and then on the "Manage" button. Then click "Add" to add a new type of
note. You'll now see another screen that gives you a choice of note types to
base the new type on. "Add" means to base the newly created type on one that
comes with Anki. "Clone" means to base the newly created type on one that is
in your collection. If you'd created a French vocab type already for example,
you might use that when creating a German vocab type.

After choosing "OK", you'll be asked to name the new type. The subject
material you're studying is a good choice here - things like "Japanese",
"Trivia", and so on. Once you've chosen a name, close the Note Types window,
and you'll return to the adding window.

[[fields]]
Customizing Fields
-------------------

To customize fields, click the "Fields..." button when adding or editing a
note.

You can add, remove, or rename fields by clicking the appropriate buttons. To
switch the order in which the fields appear in this dialog and the add notes
dialog, you can use the reposition button, which asks for the numerical
position you want the field to have. So if you want to move a field to be the
new first field, enter "1".

The options at the bottom of the screen allow you to edit various properties of
the fields to be used when adding and editing the cards. This is not where you
customize what appears on your cards when reviewing; for this, please see
<<templates,templates>>.

*Editing Font* allows you to customize the font and size used when editing
notes. This is useful if you want to make unimportant information smaller, or
increase the size of foreign characters which are hard to read. The changes
you make here do not affect how cards appear when reviewing: to do that,
please see the <<templates,templates>> section. If you have enabled the "type
in the answer" function however, the text you type will use the font size
defined here.

*Sort by this field...* tells Anki to show this field in the Sort Field column
of the browser, and you can use this to sort cards by that field. Only one
field can be the sort field at once.

When *Remember last input...* is checked, Anki will not clear out the field
content after a note is added. If you find yourself entering the same content
into multiple notes, you may find this useful.

*Reverse text direction* is useful if you are studying languages that display
text from right to left (RTL), such as Arabic or Hebrew. This setting
currently only controls editing; to make sure the text displays correctly
during review, you'll need to adjust your <<templatesrtl,template>>.

After you've added fields, you'll probably want to add them to the front or
back of your cards. For more information on that, please see the
<<templates,templates>> section.

NOTE: Do not use Tags, Type, Deck, or Card as field names, as they are
<<specialfields,special fields>> and will not work properly.

Changing Deck / Note Type
--------------------------

While adding, you can click on the top left button to change note type, and
the top right button to change deck. The window that opens up will not only
allow you to select a deck or note type, but also to add new decks or manage
your note types.

[[manydecks]]
Using Decks Appropriately
--------------------------

Decks are designed to divide your content up into broad categories
that you wish to study separately, such as English, Geography, and so on. You
may be tempted to create lots of little decks to keep your content organized,
such as "my geography book chapter 1", or "food verbs", but this is not
recommended, for the following reasons:

  * Lots of little decks mean you end up reviewing cards in a recognizable order.
    Whether it's because you're clicking on each deck in turn (which is slow)
    or you've added a number of decks under a single parent deck, you'll end up
    seeing all the "chapter 1" or "food verb" cards together. This makes it
    easier to answer the cards, as you can guess them from the context, which
    leads to weaker memories. When you need to recall the word or phrase outside
    Anki, you won't have the luxury of being shown related content first!
  * Anki was not designed to handle many decks (more than several dozen), and
    it will slow down as you add more - especially if you're studying on a mobile
    client. A few extra decks is not going to make a noticeable difference, but
    if you have many decks the delays will start to add up.

Instead of creating lots of little decks, it's a better idea to use tags and/or
fields to classify your content. Instead of creating a "food verbs" decks for
example, you could add those cards to your main language study deck, and tag
the cards with "food" and "verb". Each card can have multiple tags, which means
you can do things like search for all verbs, or all food-related vocabulary,
or all verbs that are related to food.

For those who like to stay very organized, you can add fields to your notes
to classify your content, such as "book", "page", and so on. Anki supports
searching in specific fields, which means you can do a search for
"book:'my book' page:63" and immediately find what you're looking for.

Anki's custom study and filtered deck features (covered later in the manual)
make this especially powerful, as you can create temporary decks out of
search terms. This allows you to review your content mixed together in a
single deck most of the time (for optimum memory), but also create temporary
decks when you need to focus on particular material, such as before a test.
The general rule is that if you always want to be able to study some content
separately, it should be in a normal deck, and if you only occasionally need
to be able to study it separately (for a test, when under a backlog, etc),
tags/fields and filtered decks are better.

Studying
==========

When you have found a deck you like or entered some notes in, it's time to
start studying.

Decks
------

Study in Anki is limited to the currently selected deck, and any decks it
contains. You can change the currently selected deck by clicking on "Decks" in
the main window.

On the decks screen, your decks will be displayed in a list. There are two
number columns, 'due' and 'new'. 'Due' is the count of waiting reviews and
cards currently in learning. 'New' is the number of new cards that are waiting
to be learnt that day.

When you click on a deck, it will become the 'current deck', and Anki will
change to the study screen. 

You can click the gears button to the right of a deck in order to rename or
delete decks, or customize their options.

Study Overview
--------------

After clicking on a deck to study, you'll see a screen that shows you how many
cards are due today. There are three types:

 * *New* refers to cards that you have downloaded or entered in, but have
   never been studied before.
 * *Learning* refers to cards that were seen for the first time recently,
   and are still being learnt.
 * *To Review* refers to cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be
   reviewed so you don't forget them.

To start a study session, click the *Study Now* button. Anki will proceed to
show you cards until the cards to be shown for the day have run out.

While studying, you can return to the overview by pressing the "s" key on your
keyboard.

Questions
---------

When a card is shown, only the question is shown at first. After thinking
about the answer, either click the *Show Answer* button, or press the
spacebar. The answer will then be shown. It's ok if it takes you a little
while to recall the answer, but as a general rule if you can't answer within
about 10 seconds, it's better to give up and show the answer than keep
struggling to remember.

When the answer is shown, you should compare the answer you thought of with
the answer which is shown, and tell Anki how well you remembered. If you don't
trust yourself to compare your answer accurately, you can ask Anki to prompt
you to type in the answer rather than just showing it to you. If you'd like to
do this, please see the <<templates,templates>> section.

The number of buttons available for grading depends on whether the card is
being learnt or reviewed.

[[learning]]
Learning
---------

When learning new cards, or when relearning cards that you have forgotten,
Anki will show you the cards one or more times to help you memorize them. By
default there are two steps: 1 minute and 10 minutes. You can change the
number of steps and the delays between them by clicking the *Options* button
while looking at the study overview.

There are three rating buttons when learning:

*Again* moves the card back to the first step.

*Good* moves the card to the next step. If the card was on the final step, the
card is converted into a review card (it 'graduates'). By default, the card
will be shown again the next day, and then at increasingly long delays.

*Easy* immediately converts the card into a review card, even if there were
steps remaining. By default, the card will be shown again 4 days later, and
then at increasingly long delays. The easy button will not be shown if it would
give the same interval as "good."

When cards are seen for the first time, they start at step one. This means
answering *Good* on a card for the first time will show it one more time in 10
minutes, and the initial 1 minute step will be skipped.

You can use the 1, 2 and 3 keys on your keyboard to select a particular
button, where 1 = *Again*. Pressing the spacebar will select *Good*.

If there are no other cards to show you that day, Anki will by default show
learning cards again even if their delay has not elapsed completely. If you'd
prefer to wait the full learning delay, you can change this behaviour in the
<<preferences,preferences>>.

Reviewing
---------

When a card has been previously learnt and is ready to be reviewed again,
there are four buttons to rate your answer:

*Again* marks your answer as incorrect, and asks Anki to show the card more
frequently in the future. Please see the <<lapses,lapses>> section for more
information about how lapsed reviews are handled.

*Hard* shows the card at a slightly longer delay than last time, and tells
Anki to be more conservative when scheduling the card in the future.

*Good* tells Anki that the last delay was about right, and the card easiness
doesn't need to be adjusted down or up. At the default starting easiness, the
card will be shown again approximately 2 1/2 times longer than the previous
time - so if you had waited 10 days to see the card previously, the next delay
would be about 25 days.

*Easy* tells Anki you're finding the delays too short. The card will be
scheduled further into the future than 'Good', and Anki will be more
aggressive in its scheduling of the card in the future. Because 'Easy' rapidly
increases the delay, it's best left for only the easiest of cards. Usually you
should find yourself answering 'Good' instead.

Like learning cards, you can use 1-4 on the keyboard to select an answer.
Pressing the spacebar will select 'Good'.

Due Counts and Time Estimates
-------------------------------

When only the question is shown, Anki shows three numbers like 12 + 34 + 56.
They represent the new cards, cards in learning, and cards to review. If you'd
prefer not to see the numbers, you can turn them off in Anki's preferences.

NOTE: By default, when you forget a card Anki will show it after 1 minute and
then 10 minutes. Because two reviews are required, failing a card will
increase the middle (orange) count by two.

When the answer is shown, Anki shows an estimate of the next time a card will
be shown above each button. If you'd prefer not to see the estimates, you can
also disable them in Anki's preferences.

NOTE: Anki additionally adds a small amount of random variation to the next due
times, in order to prevent cards that were introduced together and always rated
the same from always staying next to each other. This variation is not shown on
the time estimates but will be applied after selecting the button.

[[editmore]]
Editing and More
------------------

You can click the *Edit* button in the bottom left to edit the current note.
When you finish editing, you'll be returned to study. The editing screen is
very similar to the <<addingnotes,add notes>> screen.

On the bottom right is a button labeled *More*. This button provides some
other operations you can do on the current card or note:

 Mark Note ::
  Adds a "marked" tag to the current note, so it can be easily found in the
  browser. This is useful when you want to take some action on the note at a
  later date, such as looking up a word when you get home. Marked cards also
  show a small star in the upper-right-hand corner during reviews.
 Bury Card / Note ::
  Hides a card or all of the note's cards from review until you use "unbury" on
  the deck overview screen or the next day rolls around. Useful if you want to
  come back to the card another time. Burying can also <<siblings,happen
  automatically>> for cards of the same note.
 Suspend Card / Note ::
  Hides a card or all of the note's cards from review until they are manually
  unsuspended (by clicking the suspend button in the browser). Useful if
  you want to avoid reviewing the note for some time, but don't want to delete
  it. If cards were in learning when they are suspended, they are moved back
  to the new card queue or review queue.
 Delete Note ::
  Deletes the note and all of its cards.
 Card Options ::
  Edit the options for the current card.
 Replay Audio ::
  If the card has audio on the front or back, it will be played again.
 Record Own Voice ::
  Record your own voice for the purposes of checking your pronunciation. (This
  recording is temporary and will go away when you move to the next card. If
  you want to add audio to a card permanently, you can do that in the edit
  window.)
 Replay Own Voice ::
  Replay the previous recording of your voice.

[[displayorder]]
Display Order
--------------

Studying will show cards from the selected deck, and any decks it contains.
Thus if you select "French", "French::Vocab" and "French::My Textbook::Lesson
1" and so on will all be shown as well.

For new cards and reviews, Anki fetches cards from the decks in alphabetical
order. So in the above example, you would get cards first from "French", then
"My Textbook", and finally "Vocab". You can use this fact to control the order
cards appear in, placing high priority cards in decks that appear higher in
the list. When computers sort text alphabetically, the "-" character comes
before alphabetical characters, and "\~" comes after them. So if you called the
deck "-Vocab", your vocab cards would appear first, and you could call the
other deck "~My Textbook" to force it to appear after everything else.

New cards and reviews are fetched separately, and Anki won't wait until both
queues are empty before moving on to the next deck, so it's possible you'll be
exposed to new cards from a different deck to the reviews or vice versa. If
you don't want that, click directly on the deck you want to study instead of
one of the parent decks.

Cards in learning are fetched from all decks at once, because they are
somewhat time critical, and shown in the order they are due.

For more fine-grained ordering of new cards, you can change the order in the
<<browser,browser>>.

To control the order reviews from a given deck appear in, or change new cards
from ordered to random order, please see the <<deckoptions,deck options>>.

[[siblings]]
== Siblings and Burying ==

Recall from <<basics,the basics>> that Anki can create more than one card for
each thing you input, such as a front->back card and a back->front card, or two
different cloze deletions from the same text. These related cards are called
'siblings'. Anki tries to ensure siblings are not shown close together, as
that's usually not helpful.

When you answer a card that has siblings, Anki prevents the card's siblings
from being shown in the same session by automatically burying them. Buried
cards are hidden from review until the clock rolls over to a new day or you
manually unbury them using the "Unbury" button that's visible at the bottom of
the screen after clicking on a deck in the deck list.

Anki will only bury siblings that are new cards, or review cards. It will not
hide cards in learning, as time is of the essence for those cards, and
technical reasons also prevent this. On the other hand, when you study a
learning card, any new/review siblings will be buried.

If you want to see more than one card of a note when learning new cards, you
can stop Anki from burying cards in the <<newopts,deck options>>.

[[studyshortcuts]]
== Keyboard Shortcuts  ==

Many of the common operations in Anki have keyboard shortcuts. Most of them
are discoverable in the interface: menu items list their shortcuts next to
them, and hovering the mouse cursor over a button will generally show its
shortcut in a tooltip.

When studying, either space or enter will show the answer. When the answer is
shown, you can use space or enter to select the Good button. You can use the
1-4 keys to select a specific ease button. Many people find it convenient to
answer most cards with space and keep one finger on 1 for when they forget.

[[studydeck]]
The "Study Deck" item in the Tools menu allows you to quickly
switch to a deck with the keyboard. You can trigger it with the '/' key. When
opened, it will display all of your decks, and show a filter area at the top.
As you type characters, Anki will display only decks matching the characters
you type. You can add a space to separate multiple search terms, and Anki will
show only decks that match all the terms. So "ja 1" or "on1 ja" would both
match a deck called "Japanese::Lesson1".

== Falling Behind ==

If you fall behind in your reviews, Anki will prioritize cards that have been
waiting the longest. It does this by taking the 200 cards that have been waiting
the longest, and showing them to you in a random order up until your daily
review limit. This ordering ensures that no cards will be left waiting
indefinitely, but it means that if you introduce new cards, their reviews
won't appear until you've gotten through your backlog.

If you wish to change the order of the overdue reviews, you can do so by creating
a filtered deck, as described in a later section of the manual.

When you answer cards that have been waiting for a while, Anki factors in that
delay when determining the next time a card should be shown. Please see the
frequently asked questions section at the bottom of the manual for more
information.

[[editor]]
Editing
=======

Features
---------

The editor is shown when <<addingnotes,adding notes>>, <<editmore,editing a
note>> during reviews, or <<browser,browsing>>.

On the top left are two buttons, which open the <<fields,fields>> and
<<templates,cards>> windows.

On the right are buttons that control formatting. Bold, italic and underline
work like they do in a wordprocessing program. The next two buttons allow you to
subscript or superscript text, which is useful for chemical compounds like
H~2~O and or simple math equations like x^2^.

The icon with the red cross clears any formatting in the currently selected text.
This includes colours, bold, etc.

The next button allows you to change text colour.

The paperclip allows you to attach audio, images and videos to your notes. For
more information, please see the <<media,media>> section.

The red circle button allows you to record your voice and attach it to the note.

The last button allows you to add advanced mathematical markup called
<<latex,LaTeX>> to your notes, or edit the underlying formatting.

Most of the buttons have shortcut keys. You can hover the mouse cursor over a
button to see its shortcut. For the LaTeX/HTML menu, use Ctrl+t then t, e
or m to select the three LaTeX types, and Ctrl+shift+x to edit the HTML.

[[cloze]]
Cloze Deletion
---------------

Cloze deletion is the process of hiding one or more words in a sentence. For
example, if you have the sentence:

-----
Canberra was founded in 1913.
-----

...and you create a cloze deletion on "1913", then the sentence would become:

-----
Canberra was founded in [...].
-----

For more information on why you might want to use cloze deletion, see rule
number 5 http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm[here].

Anki provides a special cloze deletion type of note, to make creating clozes
easy. To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type
some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to
hide to select it, and click the [...] button. Anki will replace the text
with:

-----
Canberra was founded in {{c1::1913}}.
-----

The "c1" part means that you've created one cloze deletion on the sentence.
You can create more than one deletion if you'd like. For example, if you
select Canberra and click [...] again, the text will now look like:

-----
{{c2::Canberra}} was founded in {{c1::1913}}.
-----

When you add the above note, Anki will create two cards. The first card will
show:

-----
Canberra was founded in [...].
-----

...on the question, with the full sentence on the answer. The other card will
have the following on the question:

-----
[...] was founded in 1913.
-----

You can also elide multiple sections at once. In the above example, if you
change c2 to c1, only one card would be created, with both Canberra and 1913
hidden. If you hold down alt (option on a Mac) while creating a cloze, Anki
will automatically use the same number instead of incrementing it.

Cloze deletions don't need to fall on word boundaries, so if you select
"anberra" rather than "Canberra" in the above example, the question would
appear as "C[...] was founded in 1913", giving you a hint.

You can also give yourself hints that don't match the text. If you replace the
original sentence with:

-----
Canberra::city was founded in 1913
-----

...and then press [...] after selecting "Canberra::city", Anki will treat the
text after the two colons as a hint. When the card comes up for review, it
will appear as:

-----
[city] was founded in 1913.
-----

For information on testing your ability to type in a cloze deletion correctly,
please see the section on <<typinganswers,typing answers>>.

Please note that overlapping clozes are not supported. For example, the
following field is invalid:

-----
{{c1::Canberra was {{c2::founded}}}} in 1913
-----

If you need to create clozes from overlapping text, add another Text field to
your cloze, add it to the <<templates,template>>, and then when creating
notes, paste the text into two separate fields, like so:

-----
Text1 field: {{c1::Canberra was founded}} in 1913

Text2 field: {{c2::Canberra}} was founded in 1913
-----

The default cloze note type has a second field called Extra, that is shown on
the answer side of each card. It can be used for adding some usage notes or
extra information.

Inputting Foreign Characters and Accents
------------------------------------------

Windows, Mac and Linux provide built-in support for other languages. There is
no need to buy a different keyboard. Some flashcard programs try to save you
the trouble of enabling support on your computer, and provide a clickable set
of buttons for each foreign character, or provide their own conversion
utilities. However, this makes input a lot slower. One person
http://www.glowingfaceman.com/2008/12/french-revolution-day-7.html[writes]:

[quote]
By the way, if you're learning any foreign language with exotic characters,
even just the Spanish ñ, I encourage you to look into how to efficiently
type those characters. When I first started studying Japanese, I didn't
know how to type Japanese characters. I'd just copy-and-paste things to
make flashcards and/or communicate with people. And if I wanted to type
something original, that meant painstakingly finding, then
copying-and-pasting each individual character. With my U.S.-bought
computer, it was kind of a pain to get Japanese IME support (and it
involved borrowing a Windows XP disk from a friend since you need one to
install Microsoft's Japanese IME). But it was worth it a million times
over. In retrospect, I should have done that as one of my very first steps
when I first set out to learn Japanese.

If you're learning a right to left language, there are lots of other things to
consider. Please see http://dotancohen.com/howto/rtl_right_to_left.html[this
page] for more information

To learn more, please search Google for something like "input Japanese on a
mac" or "input german on windows", as there is plenty of good information
available.

[[templates]]
Cards and Templates
====================

As mentioned in the <<basics,basics>>, Anki creates cards automatically for
use, based on your notes. You can configure the cards Anki should create and
what should be shown on them when adding or editing material by clicking on
the "Cards..." button. Please read the basics section if you have not done so
already, as the rest of this section assumes you have read it.

At the top of the window you'll see a set of tabs listing the current cards.
You can click the plus on the right if you'd like to add another card to the
current note type. Similarly, if you'd like to delete one, you can do so by
clicking the X on the tab.

On the top left is the front template, on the bottom left is the back
template, and in between them is the card styling section.

In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the language that web pages
are written in. The styling section is CSS, which is the language used for
styling web pages.

You can watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1j1Zx0mXME[a video about
this styling cards] on YouTube.

On the right is a preview of the front and back of the currently selected
card. If you opened the window while adding notes, the preview will be based
on the text you had typed into the Add Notes window. If you opened the window
while editing a note, the preview will be based on that note.

At the bottom of the window is a More button that gives you options to rename
or reorder the cards. The "Deck Override" option allows you to change the deck
in which cards of the current type will be placed into. By default, cards are
placed into the deck you provide in the Add Notes window. If you set a deck
here, that card type will be placed into the deck you specified, instead of the
deck listed in the Add Notes window. (You can check which deck the cards are
currently going to be choosing Deck Override again.) The Browser Appearance
option allows you to set different (perhaps simplified) templates for display
in the Question and Answer columns of the browser; see
<<columntemplates, browser appearance>> for more information.

== Reverse Cards ==

You can watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnbKwHEQ1mA[a video about
reversing cards] on YouTube.

If you want to reverse your existing cards, when editing a card, click the
Cards button, and then Flip.

If you want to create cards that go in both directions (e.g., both
"ookii"->"big" and "big"->"ookii"), you have several options. The simplest is
to select the "Basic (and reversed card)" built-in note type. This will
generate two cards, one in each direction.

If you want to generate reverse cards for only some of your material (perhaps
you only want to take the time to study reverses for the most important
material, or some of your cards don't make sense reversed), you can select the
"Basic (optional reversed card)" note type. This note type generates a
forward-only card when you fill in only the first two fields; if you
additionally enter something in the "Add Reverse" field (like a 'y'), Anki will
generate a reverse card as well. The contents of this field will never be
displayed on a card.

If you later decide you don't want a reverse card (or you didn't create one at
first and now want one), you can change it by editing the "Add Reverse" field.
If you didn't select the optional reverse note type to begin with, you can use
Edit>Change Note Type in the browser to change it.

If you wish to generate reverse or certain cards only in certain situations with
a more complex note type (for instance, one with three cards), please see the
<<conditionalreplacement,conditional replacement>> section.

== Basic Templates ==

The most basic template looks something like this:

-----
{{Front}}
-----

When you place text within curly brackets, Anki looks for a field by that
name, and replaces the text with the actual content of the field. You can
include as many fields as you wish.

Your templates are not limited to a list of fields. You can also include
arbitrary text on your templates. For example, if you're studying capital
cities, and you've created a note type with a "Country" field, you might
create a question like this:

-----
What's the capital city of {{Country}}?
-----

The default back template will look something like this:

-----
{{FrontSide}}

<hr id=answer>

{{Back}}
-----

This means "show me the text that's on the question, then a divider line, and
then the back field". 

[[typinganswers]]
== Checking Your Answer ==

You can watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tYObQ3ocrw[a video about
this feature] on YouTube.

If you'd like to type in the answer and have Anki compare your input to the
real answer, you can do so by changing your template. Imagine your front
and back templates look like:

-----
{{Native Word}}
-----

-----
{{FrontSide}}

<hr id=answer>

{{Foreign Word}}
-----

To type in the foreign word and check if you are correct, you need to edit
your question template so that it looks like this:

-----
{{Native Word}}
{{type:Foreign Word}}
-----

Note that we have added 'type:' in front of the field we want to compare, and
it is copied into the answer section as well. If you don't have FrontSide on
the back of your card, you will need to add the same type directive to the
answer side as well.

When reviewing, Anki will display a text box where you can type in the answer,
and upon hitting enter or showing the answer, Anki will show you which parts
you got right and which parts you got wrong. The text box's font size will be
the size you configured for that field (via the "Fields" button when editing).

This feature does not change how the cards are answered, so it's still up to
you to decide how well you remembered or not.

NOTE: Only one typing comparison can be used on a card. If you add the above
text multiple times, it will not work. It also only supports a single line, so
it is not useful for comparing against a field that is comprised on multiple lines.

Anki uses a monospaced font for the answer comparison so that the "provided"
and "correct" sections line up. If you wish to override the font, you can put
the following at the bottom of your styling section:

-----
code#typeans { font-family: "myfontname"; }
-----

Advanced users can override the default type-answer colours with the css
classes typeGood, typeBad and typeMissed. At the time of writing, only the
computer version of Anki supports these classes.

It is also possible to type in the answer for cloze deletion cards. To do this,
add \{\{type:cloze:Text}} to both the front and back template, so the back looks
something like this:

-----
{{FrontSide}}

<hr id=answer>

{{cloze:Text}}
{{type:cloze:Text}}
-----

Note that unlike with regular cards, this must be added to both sides on a
cloze note type.

If there are multiple sections elided, you can separate the answers in the text
box with a comma.

== Newlines ==

The template language needs a special command to create a new line. For
example, if you wrote the following in the template:

-----
one
two
-----

In the preview, you'd actually see:

-----
one two
-----

To add a new line, you need to add a <br> code to the end of a line, like so:

-----
one<br>
two
-----

The br code stands for "(line) br(eak)".

The same applies for fields. If you want to display two fields, one on each
line, you would use

-----
{{Field 1}}<br>
{{Field 2}}
-----

== Card Styling ==

In between the front and back template is the card styling. Here you can
change the background colour of the card, the default font, the text
alignment, and so on.

The standard options available to you are:

 font-family ::
  The name of the font to use on the card. If your font has spaces in it like
  "MS Unicode", then you need to surround the font name in double quotes as in
  this sentence. It is also possible to use multiple fonts on one card; for
  information on that, please see below.
 font-size ::
  The size of the font in pixels. When changing it, make sure you leave px at
  the end.
 text-align ::
  Whether the text should be aligned in the center, left, or right.
 color ::
  The color of the text. Simple color names like 'blue', 'lightyellow' and so
  on will work, or you can use HTML color codes to select arbitrary colors.
  Please see http://htmlcolorcodes.org/[this webpage] for more information.
 background-color ::
  The color of the card background.

Arbitrary CSS can be placed in the styling section - advanced users may wish
to do things like add a background image or gradient for example.

The styling is shared between all cards, which means that when you make an
adjustment it will affect all cards for that note type. It is also possible to
specify card-specific styling. The following example will use a yellow
background on all cards except the first one:

-----
.card { background-color: yellow; }
.card1 { background-color: blue; }
-----

One other thing to note is that Anki shrinks images to fit the screen by
default. You can change this by adding the following to the bottom of your
styling section:

-----
img { max-width: none; max-height: none; }
-----

[[fieldstyling]]
== Field Styling ==

The default styling applies to the whole card. You can also make certain
fields or part of the card use a different font, color, and so on. This is
particularly important when studying foreign languages, as Anki will sometimes
be unable to correctly display characters unless an appropriate font has been
chosen.

Say you have an "Expression" field, and you want to give it the OSX Thai
font "Ayuthaya". Imagine your template already reads:

-----
What is {{Expression}}?

{{Notes}}
-----

What we need to do is wrap the text we want to style in some HTML. We will put
the following in front of the text:

-----
<div class=mystyle1>
-----

And the following behind it:

-----
</div>
-----

By wrapping the text like the above, we tell Anki to style the wrapped text
with a custom style called "mystyle1", which we will create later.

Thus if we wanted the entire "What is ...?" expression to use the Thai font,
we would use:

-----
<div class=mystyle1>What is {{Expression}}?</div>

{{Notes}}
-----

And if we wanted only the expression field itself to use the Thai font, we'd
use:

-----
What is <div class=mystyle1>{{Expression}}</div>?

{{Notes}}
-----

After we've edited the template, we now need to move to the Styling section
between the templates. Before editing it, it should look something like:

-----
.card {
 font-family: arial;
 font-size: 20px;
 text-align: center;
 color: black;
 background-color: white;
}
-----

Add your new style to the bottom, so it looks like:

-----
.card {
 font-family: arial;
 font-size: 20px;
 text-align: center;
 color: black;
 background-color: white;
}

.mystyle1 {
 font-family: ayuthaya;
}
-----

You can include any styling you want in the style. If you wanted to increase
the font size too, you'd change the mystyle1 section to look like:

-----
.mystyle1 {
 font-family: ayuthaya;
 font-size: 30px;
}
-----

It's also possible to bundle custom fonts with your deck, so you don't need to
install them on your computer or mobile device. Please see the
<<installingfonts,installing fonts>> section for more info.

== Hint Fields ==

It's possible to add a field to the front or back of a card, but make it
hidden until you explicitly show it. We call this a 'hint field'. Before
adding a hint, please bear in mind that the easier you make it to answer a
question in Anki, the less likely you are to remember that question when you
encounter it in real life. Please have a read about the 'minimum information
principle' on http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm before proceeding.

First, you'll need to add a field to store the hint in if you have not already.
Please see the <<fields,fields>> section if you're not sure how to do this.

Assuming you've created a field called MyField, you can tell Anki to hide it
by default by adding the following to your template:

-----
{{hint:MyField}}
-----

If MyField is blank, nothing will be shown.

If you show the hint on the question and then reveal the answer, the hint will
be hidden again. If you want to have the hint always revealed when the answer
is shown, you will need to remove \{\{FrontSide}} from your back template and
manually add the fields you wish to appear.

NOTE: It is not currently possible to use a hint field for audio -- the audio
will play regardless of whether you've clicked on the hint link.

[[specialfields]]
== Special Fields ==

There are some special fields you can include in your templates:

-----
The note's tags: {{Tags}}

The type of note: {{Type}}

The card's deck: {{Deck}}

The type of card ("Forward", etc): {{Card}}

The front text (only valid in back template): {{FrontSide}}
-----

FrontSide will not include any audio that was on the front side of the card.
If you wish to have the same audio play on both the front and back of the
card, you'll need to manually include the audio fields on the back as well.

[[cardgeneration]]
== Card Generation & Deletion ==

Anki will not create cards with empty front sides. Thus if "My Field" was
empty, and one card's front template included only that field, the card would
not be created.

If no cards can be created, then the Add Notes window will warn you and not
allow the note to be added until at least one card would be generated.

When you edit a previously added note, Anki will automatically create extra
cards if they were previously blank, but no longer so.

If your edits have made some cards blank, Anki will not delete them
immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove empty cards,
in the main window go the Tools menu and choose Empty Cards. You will be shown
a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.

It is not possible to manually delete individual cards, because they would end
up being recreated again the next time the note was edited. Instead, you can
either make the relevant fields empty and then use Empty Cards option, or you
can suspend the unwanted cards. If you need to edit multiple fields at once,
you can use the find&replace feature in the browser.

Anki does not consider special fields or non-field text for the purposes of
card generation. Thus if your front template looked like the following, no
card would be generated if Country was empty:

-----
Where is {{Country}} on the map?
-----

== Selective Card Generation ==

Please read the previous section before you read this.

Sometimes you may want to generate extra cards for only some of your material,
such as testing your ability to recall the most important words of a set. You
can accomplish this by adding an extra field to your note, and adding some
text into it (such as "1") on the notes you want the extra card. Then in the
card template, you can make the card's creation depend on that field being
non-empty. For more information on this, please see the conditional
replacement section below.

==  Media & LaTeX References ==

Anki does not scan templates for media references, because it is slow to do
so. This has implications for including media on the template.

=== Static Sounds/Images ===

If you wish to include images or sounds on your cards that are the same for
every card (eg, a company logo at the top of each card):

 1. Rename the file so it starts with an underscore, eg "_logo.jpg". The
    underscore tells Anki that the file is used by the template and it should
    be exported when sharing the deck.
 2. Add a reference to the media on your front or back template, like:

-----
<img src="_logo.jpg">
-----

=== Field References ===

Media references to fields are not allowed. They may or may not display during
review, and will not work when checking for unused media, importing/exporting,
and so on. Examples that won't work:

-----
<img src="{{Expression}}.jpg">

[sound:{{Word}}]

[latex]{{Field 1}}[/latex]
-----

Instead, you should include the media references in the field. Please
see the <<importing,importing>> section for more information.

[[conditionalreplacement]]
== Conditional Replacement ==

It is possible to include certain text on your cards only if a field is empty
or not empty. An example:

-----
This text is always shown.

{{#FieldName}}
This text is only shown if FieldName has text in it
{{/FieldName}}

{{^FieldName}}
This text is only shown if FieldName is empty
{{/FieldName}}
-----

A real life example is only showing a label if the field is not empty:

-----
{{#Tags}}Tags: {{Tags}}{{/Tags}}
-----

You can also use conditional replacement to control which cards are generated.
For example, consider a card with two fields on the front:

-----
{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}
-----

Normally a card would be generated if either the expression or notes field had
text in it. If you only wanted a card generated if expression was not empty,
then you could change the template to this:

-----
{{#Expression}}
{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}
{{/Expression}}
-----

And if you wanted to require both fields, you could use two conditional
replacements:

-----
{{#Expression}}
{{#Notes}}
{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}
{{/Notes}}
{{/Expression}}
-----

Keep in mind that, as mentioned in the <<cardgeneration,card generation>>
section, this only works when you place the conditional replacement code on the
''front'' of the card; if you do this on the back, you will simply end up with
cards with a blank back side.

The default behaviour can be thought of as an "OR" condition - cards are
created if the first field is non-empty, OR the second field is non-empty, and
so on. The behaviour above can be thought of as an "AND" condition - cards are
created if the first field is non-empty AND the second field is non-empty, and
so on. 

A caveat: Anki is not currently able to mix AND and OR conditions. Thus the
following template, which says "require expression and notes, or field 3",
would not work:

-----
{{#Expression}}
{{#Notes}}
{{Expression}}
{{Notes}}
{{/Notes}}
{{/Expression}}

{{Field 3}}
-----

Another caveat is that negated expressions can not be used to control card
generation. That is, wrapping a template in \{\{^Field}} will not do what you
expect.

[[clozetemplates]]
== Cloze Templates ==

Please see the <<cloze,cloze deletion>> section for background info.

The cloze note type functions differently from regular note types. Instead of
a customizable number of card templates, it has a single template which is
shared by all cloze deletions on a note.

As mentioned in the card generation section above, generation of regular cards
depends on one or more fields on the question being non-empty. Cloze deletion
note types are generated differently:

 * Anki looks on the front template for one or more cloze replacements,
   like \{\{cloze:FieldName}}. 
 * It then looks in the FieldName field for all cloze references, like
   \{\{c1::text}}.
 * For each separate number, a card will be generated.

Conditional generation provides a special field so you can check which card
you are rendering. If you wanted to display the "hint1" field on the first
cloze, and "hint2" field on the second cloze for example, you could use the
following template:

-----
{{cloze:Text}}

{{#c1}}
{{Hint1}}
{{/c1}}

{{#c2}}
{{Hint2}}
{{/c2}}
-----

== Other HTML ==

Your templates can contain arbitrary HTML, which means that all the layout
possibilities used on internet web pages can also be used on your cards.
Things like tables, lists, images, links to external pages and so on are all
supported. With tables for example, you could change the layout so that the
front and back of a card appear on the left and right instead of the top and
bottom.

Covering all of HTML's features is outside the scope of this manual, but there
are plenty of good introductory guides to HTML available on the web if you'd
like to learn more.

== Dictionary Links ==

You can also use field replacement to create dictionary links. Imagine you're
studying a language and your favourite online dictionary allows you to search
for text using a web URL like:

-----
http://example.com/search?q=myword
-----

You could add an automatic link by doing the following in your template:

-----
{{Expression}}

<a href="http://example.com/search?q={{Expression}}">check in dictionary</a>
-----

The template above would allow you to search for each note's expression by
clicking on the link while reviewing. There is a caveat however, so please see
the next section.

== HTML Stripping ==

Like templates, fields are stored in HTML. In the dictionary link example
above, if the expression contained the word "myword" without any formatting,
then the HTML would be the same: "myword". But when you include formatting in
your fields, extra HTML is included. If "myword" was bolded for example, the
actual HTML would be "<b>myword</b>".

This can present a problem for things like dictionary links. In the above
example, the dictionary link would end up being:

-----
<a href="http://example.com/search?q=<b>myword</b>">check in dictionary</a>
-----

The extra characters in the link would likely confuse the dictionary site, and
you're likely not to get any matches.

To solve this, Anki provides the ability to strip formatting from fields when
they are replaced. If you prefix a field name with text:, Anki will not
include any formatting. So a dictionary link that worked even with formatted
text would be:

-----
<a href="http://example.com/search?q={{text:Expression}}">check in dictionary</a>
-----

[[columntemplates]]
== Browser Appearance ==

If your card templates are complex, it may be difficult to read the question and
answer columns (called "Front" and "Back") in the <<cardlist,card list>>.  The
"browser appearance" option allows you to define a custom template to be used only
in the browser, so you can include only the important fields and change the
order if you desire. The syntax is the same as in standard card templates.

[[templatertl]]
== RTL (right to left) text ==

If you're learning a language that reads from right to left, you'll need to
adjust the template like so:

-----
<div dir=rtl>{{FieldThatHasRTLTextInIt}}</div>
-----

If you were linked directly here, please see the start of this section for
more information.

[[platformcss]]
== Platform-Specific CSS ==

Anki defines some special CSS classes that allow you to define different
styling for different platforms. The example below shows how to vary the font
depending on where you're reviewing:

-----
.win .jp { font-family: "MS Mincho"; }
.mac .jp { font-family: "Hiragino Mincho Pro"; }
.linux .jp { font-family: "Kochi Mincho"; }
.mobile .jp { font-family: "Hiragino Mincho ProN"; }
-----

And in the template:

-----
<div class=jp>{{Field}}</div>
-----

You can also use properties like .gecko, .opera, and .ie to select particular
browsers when using AnkiWeb. Please see
http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ for a full list of options.

[[installingfonts]]
== Installing Fonts ==

If you're using Anki on a work or school computer where you don't have
permission to install new fonts, or you're using Anki on a mobile device, it's
possible to add fonts directly to Anki.

To add a font to Anki, it must be in the TrueType format. TrueType fonts have
a filename ending in .ttf, such as "Arial.ttf". Once you've located a TrueType
font, we'll need to add it to the media folder:

 . Rename the file, adding an underscore at the start, so it becomes like
   "_arial.ttf". Adding an underscore will tell Anki that this file will be
   used on a template, and should not be deleted when checking for unused media.
 . In your computer's file browser, go to your Documents folder, then the Anki
   folder inside it, and then a folder called "User 1" (or your profile name
   if you've renamed/added profiles).
 . Inside the folder, you should see a folder called collection.media. Drag
   the renamed file to that folder.

After that, we need to update the template:

 . Click *Add* at the top of the main screen, and then select the note type
   you want to change with the top left button.
 . Click *Cards*.
 . In the styling section, add the following text to the bottom, replacing
   "_arial.ttf" with the name of the file you copied into your media folder:
-----
@font-face { font-family: myfont; src: url('_arial.ttf'); }
-----

After that, you can either change the font for the entire card, or for
individual fields. To change the font for the entire card, simply locate the
font-family: line in the .card section and change the font to "myfont". To
change the font for only certain fields, please see the <<fieldstyling,Field
Styling>> instructions above.

NOTE: Please make sure the filenames match exactly. If the file is called
arial.TTF and you write arial.ttf in your card templates, it will not work.

NOTE: Due to a bug in the toolkit Anki uses, embedded fonts can cause crashes
on OS X. A workaround is posted on
https://anki.tenderapp.com/discussions/ankidesktop/4161-crash-when-showing-answer-with-custom-font-mac-109anki-2018#comment_30164833

[[profileprefs]]
= Profiles & Preferences =

[[profiles]]
Profiles
---------

If more than one person wants to use Anki on your computer, you can set up a
separate profile for each user. Each user profile has their own collection,
and own program settings. Profiles are configured by going to the File menu
and choosing "Switch Profile".

It's possible to assign a password to your profile by going to Anki's
preferences window. Your collection is not encrypted, and people can still
tamper with the file if they locate it on your hard disk. The password
protection is mainly intended to make it harder for students to tamper with
each other's decks and settings in a classroom environment.

While most people will want to stick to one profile per user, it's possible to
use extra profiles for testing purposes or for separating decks you want to
keep on AnkiWeb from ones you do not.

[[preferences]]
Preferences
------------

The preferences are available from the Tools menu on Windows/Linux, or the
Anki menu on a Mac. If you have multiple profiles, any changes you make will
apply only to the current profile.

*Basic*

The *Strip HTML* option controls whether Anki should strip the formatting from
text you paste into the editor. By default, Anki strips the formatting from
pasted text so that you can control formatting in your card templates instead.
If you'd prefer the formatting to be preserved (so you can paste bolded text,
etc), you can uncheck this option.

By default Anki pastes images on the clipboard as JPG files, to save disk
space. You can use the *Paste clipboard images as PNG* option to paste as PNG
images instead. PNG images support transparent backgrounds and are lossless,
but they usually result in much larger file sizes.

The first drop-down box controls how note types and decks interact. The default
of "When adding, default to current deck" means that Anki saves the last-used
note type for each deck and selects it again then next time you choose the deck
(and, in addition, will start with the current deck selected when choosing Add
from anywhere). The other option, "Change deck depending on note type," saves
the last-used deck for each note type (and opens the add window to the
last-used note type when you choose Add). This may be more convenient if you
always use a single note type for each deck.

The second drop-down box controls when new cards are shown: either mixed with,
before, or after all reviews.

The *Next day starts at* option controls when Anki should start showing the
next day's cards. The default setting of 4AM ensures that if you're studying
around midnight, you won't have two days' worth of cards shown to you in one
session. If you stay up very late or wake up very early, you may want to
adjust this to a time you're usually sleeping.

The *Learn ahead limit* tells Anki how to behave when there is nothing left to
study in the current deck but cards in learning. The default setting of 20
minutes tells Anki that cards should be shown early if they have a delay of
less than 20 minutes and there's nothing else to do. If you set this to 0,
Anki will always wait the full delay, showing the congratulations screen until
the remaining cards are ready to be reviewed.

Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity
(such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the
*timebox time limit* to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically
show you how many cards you've managed to study during the prescribed time
limit.

[[deckoptions]]
= Deck Options =

Deck options are accessed by selecting a deck on the 'Decks' screen, and then
clicking 'Options' at the bottom of the screen.

Anki allows you to share options between different decks, to make updating
options in many decks at once easy. To do this, options are grouped into an
'options group'. By default, all newly created decks use the same options
group, and decks imported from previous versions of Anki have separate option
groups. If you'd like to alter the settings on one deck but not other decks,
click the gears icon in the top right and add a new options group.

Please only change options that you fully understand, as inappropriate
adjustments may render Anki less effective.

NOTE: Options are not retroactive. For example, if you change an option that
controls the delay after failing a card, cards that you failed prior to
changing the option will have the old delay, not the new one.

[[newopts]]
New Cards
---------

*Steps* controls the number of learning repetitions, and the delay between
them. Please see the <<learning,learning>> section for an overview of how the
steps work.

Steps over a day (1440 minutes) are supported as well - if you want, you can
define a schedule like 10 minutes, 1 day, 3 days and then finally 7 days
before the card becomes a review card.

NOTE: If there's nothing else to study, Anki will show cards up to 20 minutes
early by default. The amount of time to look ahead is configurable in the
<<preferences,preferences>>. One thing to be aware of is that the due counts
will differ between the deck screen and study screens in this case. The
deck screen will not count cards that are not ready, but the study screen
will. This is done so that you can tell which decks need your attention.

NOTE: Anki treats small steps and steps that cross a day boundary differently.
With small steps, the cards are shown as soon as the delay has passed, in
preference to other waiting cards like reviews. This is done so that you can
answer the card as closely to your requested delay as possible. In contrast,
cards that cross a day boundary are scheduled on a per-day basis like reviews
are. When you return to study the next day, the per-day learning cards will
not be shown first, as that can make the first half of a review session
frustratingly difficult. Instead, the cards will be shown after reviews are
completed. They are included in the review count rather than the learning
count, due to the way they are handled internally.

*Order* controls whether Anki should add new cards into the deck randomly, or
in order. When you change this option, Anki will re-sort the decks using the
current option group. One caveat with random order mode: if you review many of
your new cards and then add more new cards, the newly added material is
statistically more likely to appear than the previously remaining cards. To
correct this, you can change the order to ordered mode and back again to force
a re-sort.

NOTE: When you select random order, Anki will randomize your notes, keeping
the cards of a given note close together. The cards of a given note are shown
in the order their card templates appear in, so that siblings are introduced
consistently - otherwise you could end up in a state where some notes had all
their cards introduced and other notes had only one or two. Please see the
"bury related" option below for more info.

*New cards/day* tells Anki how many new cards you'd like introduced on each
day you open the program. Missed days will not cause the cards to pile up. The
limit applies to the current deck and subdecks. This means if "French" has a
limit of 20 cards and "French::Lesson 1" and "French::Lesson 2" both have
limits of 15 cards, you'll get 15 cards from lesson 1 but only 5 cards from
lesson 2.

NOTE: Studying new cards will temporarily increase the number of reviews you
need to do a day, as freshly learnt material needs to be repeated a number of
times before the delay between repetitions can increase appreciably. If you
are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews
to be roughly about 200 cards/day. You can decrease the reviews required by
introducing fewer new cards each day, or by turning off new card display until
your review burden decreases. More than one Anki user has excitedly studied
hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then
become overwhelmed by the reviews required.

*Graduating interval* is the delay between answering 'Good' on a card with no
steps left, and seeing the card again.

*Easy interval* is the delay between answering 'easy' on a card and seeing it again.

*Starting ease* controls the easiness that cards start out with. It is set
when you see a card for the first time. It defaults to 250%, meaning that once
you've finished learning a card, answering "Good" on subsequent reviews will
increase the delay by approximately 2.5x (eg if the last delay was 10 days,
the next delay would be 25 days). Based upon how you rate the card in
subsequent reviews, the easiness may increase or decrease from what it starts
out as.

Turning off *bury related...* will prevent Anki from <<siblings,burying
siblings>>, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly
after one another in the same session. For this to work, your new cards/day
setting needs to be large enough for the cards of multiple notes to be
included.

Reviews
--------

*Maximum reviews/day* allows you to set an upper limit on the number of
reviews to show each day. When this limit is reached, Anki will not show any
more review cards for the day, even if there are some waiting. If you study
consistently, this setting can help to smooth out occasional peaks in due card
counts, and can save you from a heart attack when returning to Anki after a
week off. When reviews have been hidden due to this option, a message will
appear in the congratulations screen, suggesting you consider increasing the
limit if you have time.

*Easy bonus* allows you to set the difference in intervals between answering
'Good' and 'Easy' on a card.

*Interval modifier* allows you to apply a multiplication factor to the
intervals Anki generates. At its default of 100% it does nothing; if you set it
to 80% for example, intervals will be generated at 80% of their normal size
(so a 10 day interval would become 8 days). You can thus use the multiplier to
make Anki present cards more or less frequently than it would otherwise,
trading study time for retention or vice versa.

For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember
approximately 90% of mature cards that come up for review. You can find out
your own performance by opening the graphs/statistics for a deck and looking
at the Answer Buttons graph - mature retention is the correct% on the right
side of the graph. If you haven't been studying long you may not have any
mature cards yet. As performance with new cards and younger cards can vary
considerably, it's a good idea to wait until you have a reasonable amount of
mature reviews before you start drawing conclusions about your retention rate.

On the SuperMemo website, they suggest that you can find an appropriate
multiplier for a desired retention rate. Their formula boils down to:

-----
log(desired retention%) / log(current retention%)
-----

Imagine we have a current retention rate of 85% and we want to increase it to
90%. We'd calculate the modifier as:

-----
log(90%) / log(85%) = 0.65
-----

You can use Google to https://www.google.com/search?q=log(90%25)+%2F+log(85%25)[calculate it] for you.

If you plug the resulting 65% into the interval modifier, you should find
over time that your retention moves closer to your desired retention.

One important thing to note however is that the tradeoff between time spent
studying and retention is not linear: we can see here that to increase our
retention by 5 percentage points, we'd have to study 35% more frequently. If
the material you are learning is very important then it may be worth the extra
effort - that's something you'll need to decide for yourself. If you're simply
worried that you're forgetting too much, you may find investing more time into
the initial learning stage and/or making mnemonics gives you more gain for
less effort.

One final thing to note is that Anki forces a new interval to be at least 1
day longer than it was previously so that you don't get stuck reviewing with
the same interval forever. If your goal is to repeat a card once a day for
multiple days, you can do that by setting more learning mode steps instead of
by adjusting this modifier.

*Maximum interval* allows you to place an upper limit on the time Anki will
wait to reshow a card. The default is 100 years; you can decrease this to a
smaller number if you're willing to trade extra study time for higher
retention.

Turning off *bury related...* will prevent Anki from <<siblings,burying
siblings>>, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly
after one another in the same session.

[[lapses]]
Lapses
------

When you forget a review card, it is said to have 'lapsed'. The default
behaviour for lapsed reviews is to reset the interval to 1 (ie, make it due
tomorrow), and put it in the learning queue for a refresher in 10 minutes.
This behaviour can be customized with the options listed below.

If you leave the steps blank, Anki will not place the card back in the
learning queue, and it will be rescheduled as a review with its new interval
determined by the settings below.

NOTE: The new interval is determined when you answer "Again" to a review card,
not when the card finishes its relearning steps. For this reason, the "Good"
and "Easy" buttons during relearing do not alter the interval again - they
only control which step you are on. If there is only a single step (the
default), the "Easy" button will be hidden, since it would accomplish the same
thing as the "Good" button. If you have 2 or more steps, "Easy" is not hidden,
to allow you to graduate cards from the queue before all of their steps are
finished.

'New interval' controls how much Anki should reduce the previous interval by.
If the card had a 100 day interval, the default of 0% would reduce the
interval to 0 (but see the next option). If you set this option to 20%, the
card would have its interval reduced to 20 days instead.

'Minimum interval' allows you to apply a minimum limit to the above option.
The default setting says that lapses should be reviewed one day later. The
interval must be 1 day or more.

The leech options control the way Anki handles leeches. Please see the leech
section for more information.

General
--------

Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each question so that it can
show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not
influence scheduling. If you take longer than 60 seconds, Anki assumes you
have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the
recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don't end up with inaccurate
statistics. The 'ignore answer times...' option allows you to adjust the
cutoff threshold. The minimum cutoff is 30 seconds.

If 'show answer timer' is checked, Anki will display the current time taken
for each card in the study area.

By default, Anki automatically plays audio on the front and back of cards. If
you uncheck 'automatically play audio', Anki will not play audio until you
click the replay audio button.

The 'when answer shown, replay both question and answer audio' option controls
what happens when you choose to replay audio while the answer is shown. Please
note that it does not control what happens when you show the answer; for that
please see <<specialfields,this section>>.

Description
------------

This section allows you to edit the deck description, which is shown in the
study overview. The description is automatically set when downloading shared
decks. You can delete all the text in the description if you no longer want to
see it in the study overview area.

[[syncing]]
= AnkiWeb and Synchronization =

AnkiWeb is a service that allows you to keep your collection synchronized across
multiple devices, and to study online. Please sign up for a {ankiweb}[free
account] before following the steps below.

Setup
------

To start syncing your collection across devices, click the sync button (the
top right one on the main screen), or press 'y' on your keyboard. You'll be
prompted for your AnkiWeb ID and password, which you created in the signup
process.

When you synchronize your collection for the first time, Anki will not be able
to merge the content stored on AnkiWeb and the content stored on your
computer, so you'll need to choose which side you'd like to keep. Once the
initial setup is completed however, Anki will be able to merge changes from
multiple locations with a few exceptions.

Automatic Syncing
------------------

Once syncing is enabled, Anki will automatically sync each time your
collection is closed or opened. If you would prefer to synchronize manually,
you can disable automatic syncing in Anki's preferences.

Media
------

Anki will synchronize any sounds and images used by your notes. It will notice
when media has been added or removed from your media folder, but will not
notice if you have edited some existing files without adding or removing any.
To get your edits noticed, you need to add or remove a file as well.

NOTE: If you're running Anki off a USB flash drive, you should use an NTFS
file system, as Anki may not be able to detect media changes on a FAT32
filesystem.

Conflicts
----------

Reviews and note edits can be merged, so if you review or edit on two
different devices before syncing, Anki will preserve your changes from both
locations. If the same card has been reviewed in two different locations, both
reviews will be marked in the revision history, and the card will be kept in
the state it was when it was most recently answered.

There are certain changes that Anki is unable to merge. These mainly relate to
the format of notes: things like adding a new field, or removing a card
template. When you perform an operation that can't be merged, Anki will warn
you, and give you the option of aborting the operation. If you choose to
continue, you'll be asked to choose whether to keep the local copy or the copy
on AnkiWeb when your collection is next synchronized.

If you wish to force a full upload or download (for example, because you
accidentally deleted a deck on one side and want to restore the deck rather
than having its deletion synchronized), you can check the "On next sync, force
changes in one direction" box in Tools>Preferences>Network, then sync as usual.
(You'll be given the option to choose which side you want to use.)

Proxies
--------

Anki syncs over secure HTTP connections. If you need a proxy to access the
internet, Anki should automatically pick up your system proxy settings if
you're on Windows or OS X, and will honour the HTTP_PROXY environment variable
if you're on another platform.

Please note that advanced proxy setup via .pac or .wpad files is not supported
in Anki.

To override the system proxy settings on Windows or OS X, define a HTTP_PROXY
environmental variable that points to the proxy server. It will look like:

-----
http://user:pass@proxy.company.com:8080
-----

If your username or password contains an @ (eg user@workdomain.com), you need
to change it to %40, like so:

-----
http://user%40workdomain.com:pass@proxy.company.com:8080
-----

If for some reason Anki is unable to pick up your system settings on Windows,
please use an http://www.itechtalk.com/thread3595.html[environmental variable]
instead, as described above.

[[browser]]
= Browser =

The browser (which has nothing to do with web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox)
allows you to search through your cards and notes and edit them. It is opened
by clicking on 'Browse' in the main window, or by pressing 'b' on your
keyboard. It is comprised of three sections: the 'sidebar' on the left, the
'card list' on the top right, and the 'current note' on the bottom right.  By
positioning the mouse between two sections, it is possible to click and drag to
expand one section and shrink another.

Sidebar
--------

The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. Various
search terms as described below are listed, along with all deck names and tag
names. Clicking on an item will search for it.

You can hold down ctrl (command on a Mac) and click in order to append the
clicked item to the current search with an AND condition, instead of starting a
new search. If you wanted to show learning cards that were also in the German
deck for instance, you could click on "Learning", then ctrl+click on "German".

You can hold down shift to create an OR search instead of an AND (for example,
you could click one deck, then shift-click another to show cards from either of
the decks in the same view).

You can hold down alt (option on a Mac) in order to reverse the search (prepend
a '-') (for instance, to show all cards in a current deck that do _not_ have a
certain tag).

[[searching]]
Searching
---------

Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to
search for cards.

=== Simple searches ===

When you type some text into the search box, Anki finds matching notes and
displays their cards. Some examples:

 dog :: search for "dog" - will match words like "doggy" and "underdog" too
 dog cat :: finds notes with both "dog" and "cat", such as "a dog and cat"
 dog or cat :: finds notes with either "dog" or "cat"
 dog (cat or mouse) :: finds notes with dog and cat, or dog and mouse
 -cat :: finds notes without the word "cat".
 -cat -mouse :: finds notes with neither "cat" nor "mouse".
 -(cat or mouse) :: same as the above.
 "a dog" :: finds notes with the exact phrase "a dog" on them
 -"a dog" :: finds notes without the exact phrase "a dog"
  d_g :: finds notes with d, <a letter>, g, like dog, dig, dug, and so on.
  d*g :: finds notes with d, <zero or more letters>, g, like dg, dog, dung, etc.

Things to note from the above:

 * Search terms are separated by spaces
 * When multiple search terms are provided, Anki looks for notes that match
   all of the terms
 * You can use "or" if you only need one of the terms to match
 * You can prepend a minus sign to a term to find notes that don't match
 * If you want to search for something including a space or parenthese, enclose
   it in quotes.
 * Anki is only able to search within formatting in the <<fields,sort
field>> you've configured. For example, if you add "**exa**mple" to one of your
fields, this will not be matched when searching for "example" unless that
field is the sort field.

=== Limiting to a field ===

You can also ask Anki to match only if a particular field contains some text.
Unlike the searches above, searching on fields requires an 'exact match' by
default.

 front:dog :: find notes with a Front field of exactly "dog". A field that
   says "a dog" will not match.
 front:*dog* :: find notes with Front field containing dog somewhere
 front: :: find notes that have an empty Front field
 -front: :: find notes that have a non-empty Front field
 front:* :: find notes that have a Front field, empty or not

=== Tags, decks, cards and notes ===

 tag:animal :: find notes with the tag "animal"
 tag:none :: find notes with no tags
 tag:ani* :: find notes with tags starting with ani

 deck:french :: find cards in a French deck, or subdecks like French::Vocab
 deck:french -deck:french::* :: find cards in French, but not subdecks
 deck:"french vocab" :: searching when a deck has a space
 "deck:french vocab" :: also ok
 deck:filtered :: filtered decks only
 -deck:filtered :: normal decks only

 card:forward :: search for Forward cards
 card:1 :: search for cards by template number - eg, to find the second cloze
   deletion for a note, you'd use card:2

 note:basic :: search for cards with a Basic note type

=== Card types ===

 is:due :: review cards and learning cards waiting to be studied
 is:new :: new cards
 is:learn :: cards in learning
 is:review :: reviews (both due and not due)
 is:suspended :: cards that have been manually suspended

=== Card properties ===

 prop:ivl>=10 :: cards with interval of 10 days or more
 prop:due=1 :: cards due tomorrow
 prop:due=-1 :: cards due yesterday that haven't been answered yet
 prop:due>-1 prop:due<1 :: cards due between yesterday and tomorrow
 prop:reps<10 :: cards that have been answered less than 10 times
 prop:lapses>3 :: cards that have moved into relearning more than 3 times
 prop:ease!=2.5 :: cards easier or harder than default

Note that due only matches review cards and learning cards with an interval of
a day or more: cards in learning with small intervals like 10 minutes are not
included.

=== Recently added ===

 added:1 :: cards added today
 added:7 :: cards added in last week

The check is made against card creation time rather than note creation time,
so cards that were generated within the time frame will be included even if
their notes were added a long time ago.

=== Recently answered ===

 rated:1 :: cards answered today
 rated:1:2 :: cards answered Hard (2) today
 rated:7:1 :: cards answered Again (1) over the last 7 days
 rated:31:4 :: cards answered Easy (4) in the last month

For speed, rating searches are limited to 31 days.

[[cardlist]]
Card List 
----------

The card list displays cards that match the current search.

The columns are configurable: right click on one (or ctrl+click on a Mac) to
choose which columns you'd like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them.
Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort
order. Not all columns can be sorted on.

NOTE: The due column behaves differently for different types of cards. New cards
show a number rather than a due date, which indicates the order the new cards
will be presented in. Cards in (re)learning and reviews will both show a due
date, but when sorting they are first grouped by type and then sorted by date.

NOTE: The "edited" and "changed" columns sound the same but track different
things. "Edited" tracks the last time changes were made to the 'note' (e.g.,
when the content of a field was edited), while "changed" tracks the last time
changes were made to the 'card' (e.g., when you reviewed the card and the
review history and interval were updated).

When you click on a card, its note will be shown in the bottom section. If you
drag the mouse or hold ctrl or command to select multiple cards, the editor
will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can
operate on multiple cards at once.

The background colour will change depending on the card. Marked cards are a
shade of purple. Suspended cards are a shade of yellow. For more information
about marked and suspended cards, please see <<editmore,editing and more>>.

One of the available columns is called the 'sort field'. Anki allows you to
choose one field from each type of note to be used for sorting. You can change
the sort field by clicking on "Fields..." in the current note section.

The question and answer columns display what you'd see on the question and
answer while reviewing, except the answer column will strip the question part
for clarity. You can also choose a <<columntemplates,custom format>> in the
card template editor instead of showing what would be seen during review.

Current Note
--------------

The bottom right area displays the currently selected card's note. For more
information about cards and notes, please see <<basics,the basics>>. For more
information on formatting buttons, please see <<editor,editing>>.

You can see a preview of what the currently selected card would look like when
reviewing by clicking the "preview" button next to the search box.

Toolbar
--------

Up the top of the browser window is the toolbar.

'Info' shows various information about the currently selected card, including
its review history. For more information, see the <<stats,statistics>> section.

'Mark' and 'Suspend' are documented in <<editmore,editing and more>>.

'Change Deck' allows you to move cards to a different deck. Cards can be placed
in different decks, so if you want to move all cards in a note, you should
first use Edit > Select Notes.

'Add Tags' and 'Remove Tags' allow you to add or remove tags in bulk.

'Delete' removes the selected card(s) and their notes. It is not possible to
remove individual cards, as individual cards are controlled by the
<<templates,templates>>.

[[findreplace]]
Find and Replace
--------------

This option (Edit>Find and Replace) allows you to replace text in the cards you
have selected. The regular expression option allows you to perform complex
replacements. For example, given the following text on a card:

-----
<img src="pic.jpg">
-----

Searching for:

-----
<img src="(.+)">
-----

And replacing with the regexp:

-----
\1
-----

Will change the card to:

-----
pic.jpg
-----

A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this
document. There are a number of tutorials available on the web. Please see
http://docs.python.org/library/re.html for the particular format Anki uses.

Finding Duplicates
-------------------

You can use the Edit>Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the
same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note
types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for
duplicates in the "Back" field, you'd select it from the list and then click
"Search".

Unlike the check that happens when you add cards manually, the duplicate
finding feature is not limited to a single note type. This means that by
default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided.

The search area allows you to narrow down where Anki will look for duplicates.
If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab" and "French
Verbs" note types, you would enter:

-----
note:'french vocab' or note:'french verbs'
-----

The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. Please
see the <<searching,searching>> section for more information.

You can click one of the links in the search results list to display the
duplicate notes in that set. If the search brings up a large number of
duplicates, you may wish to instead click the Tag Duplicates button, which will
tag all matching notes with "duplicate." You can then search for this tag in
the browser and handle them all from the same screen.

[[browsermisc]]
Other Menu Items
-----------------

Some other items in the Edit menu:

'Reschedule' allows you to move cards to the end of the new card queue, or
reschedule them as a review card on a given date. The second option is useful
if you have imported already-learnt material, and you want to start it off
with higher initial intervals. For example, choosing 60 and 90 will give all
the imported cards an initial interval of 2 to 3 months.

The card's revision history is not cleared when rescheduling: rescheduling
changes the current state of a card, but not its history. If you want to hide
the history, you will need to export your notes as a text file, delete the
notes, and then import the text file again, creating new notes.

'Reposition' allows you to change the order new cards will appear in. You can
find out the existing positions by enabling the 'due' column, as described in
the card list section above. If you run the reposition command when multiple
cards are selected, it will apply increasing numbers to each card in turn. By
default the number increases by one for each card, but this can be adjusted by
changing the "step" setting.

'Change Note Type' allows you to convert the selected notes from one type to
another type, and/or convert between card templates. For example, imagine you
have a Russian note type and a Computer note type, and you accidentally added
some computer-related text into a Russian note. You can use this option to fix
that mistake. The progress of cards is not reset.

'Select Notes' takes the currently selected cards, finds their notes, and then
selects all cards of those notes. If your notes have only one card, this does
nothing.

////
'Browser options' lets you alter the card list font, and turn on full
searching. Full searching is necessary if your words are partially formatted.
For example, if you have the word "hello" and you have bolded only the first
three characters, a regular search for "hello" will not be able to find the
word, as there is formatting in the middle of it. Full searching works around
this problem, but it is considerably slower. Note that searching is able to
find partially formatted text if it's in the current sort field.
////

The 'Go' menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of
the browser, and to go up and down the card list.

[[cramming]]
[[filtered]]
= Filtered Decks & Cramming =

When you study a regular deck in Anki, only a limited number of cards are
shown: the cards Anki thinks you're about to forget, and a daily limit of new
cards. This is generally useful, as it ensures you don't spend more time
studying than necessary. But sometimes it can be useful to step outside of
these normal limits, such as when you need to revise for a test, focus on
particular material, and so on. To make this possible, Anki provides a
different type of deck called a 'filtered deck'.

Filtered decks offer a lot of possibilities. They can be used for previewing
cards, cramming cards before a test, studying particular tags, catching up on
a backlog with a particular sort order, reviewing ahead of schedule, going
over the day’s failed cards, and more.

== Custom Study ==

The easiest way to create a filtered deck is with the Custom Study button,
which appears at the bottom of the screen when you click on a deck. It offers
some convenient presets for common tasks like reviewing the cards you've
failed that day. It will create a filtered deck called "Custom Study Session"
and automatically open it for you.

If an existing "Custom Study Session" deck exists, it will be emptied before a
new one is created. If you wish to keep a custom study deck, you can rename it
from the deck list.

Here is a summary of each of the options:

 Increase today's new card limit ::
  Add more new cards to the deck you are currently studying. Note that unlike
  other options, this does 'not' create a new filtered deck, it modifies the
  existing deck.
 Increase today's review card limit ::
  If not all reviews due today were shown due to the daily review limit, this
  option allows you to show more of them. Like with the new cards option, this
  modifies the existing deck.
 Review forgotten cards ::
  Show all cards that you've answered Again (1) to within a number of days you
  specify.
 Review ahead ::
  Show cards that will be due in the near future (a number of days you specify).
  This is useful for working through some of your older cards before a
  vacation, but it will not help with cards you have learnt recently. Please
  see the <<reviewingahead,reviewing ahead>> section below for more info.
 Preview new cards ::
  Show cards that you have recently added.
 Study by card state or tag ::
  Select a certain number of cards from the current deck to study. You can
  choose to select new cards only, due cards only, or all cards; after you
  click "Choose Tags", you can also limit the selected cards by tags. If you
  wish to see all the cards in the deck (for instance, to study before a big
  test), you can set the number of cards to more than the number of cards in
  the deck.

== Home Decks ==

When a card is moved to a filtered deck, it retains a link to the deck it was
in previously. That previous deck is said to be the card's 'home deck'.

Cards automatically return to their home deck after they are studied in the
filtered deck. This can be after a single review, or after multiple reviews,
depending on your settings.

It is also possible to move all cards back to their home decks at once:

 * The "Empty" button in the study overview moves all cards in the filtered
   deck back to their home deck, but does not delete the empty filtered deck.
   This can be useful if you want to fill it again later (using the Rebuild
   button).
 * Deleting a filtered deck does the same thing as "Empty" does, but also
   removes the emptied deck from the deck list. No cards are deleted when you
   delete a filtered deck.

NOTE: In the current implementation, if you empty or delete a filtered deck
while cards are still in learning, they will be turned back into new cards.

== Creating Manually ==

Advanced users can create filtered decks with arbitrary search strings,
instead of relying on set presets. To create a filtered deck manually, choose
Create Filtered Deck from the Tools menu.

When you click the Build button, Anki finds cards that match the settings you
specified, and temporarily moves them from their existing decks into your new
filtered deck for study.

If you wish to fetch cards again using the same filter options (for instance, if
you want to study all cards with a particular tag every day), you can use the
Rebuild button at the bottom of the deck's overview screen.

The *search* area controls what cards Anki will gather. All of the searches
possible in the browser are also possible for filtered decks, such as limiting
to tags, finding cards forgotten a certain number of times, and so on. Please
see the <<searching,searching>> section of the manual for more information on
the different possibilities.

The *limit* option controls how many cards will be gathered into the deck. The
order you select controls both the order cards are gathered in, and the order
they will be reviewed in. If you select "most lapses" and a limit of 20 for
example, then Anki will show you only the 20 most lapsed cards.

For efficiency reasons, if your cram deck contains more than 1000 cards, only
1000 cards will be shown as due on the deck list and study screens.

== Order ==
The "cards selected by" option controls the order that cards will appear in. If
the maximum number of cards you select is lower than the number of cards that
match the filter criteria, Anki will exclude the cards at the end of this
sorted list first.

 Oldest seen first ::
  Display cards that you haven't seen in reviews for the longest time first.
 Random ::
  Randomize the order of all cards that match the filter criteria (use no set
  order).
 Increasing intervals ::
  Display cards that have the smallest interval first.
 Decreasing intervals ::
  Display cards that have the largest interval first.
 Most lapses ::
  Display cards that you have failed the most times first.
 Order added ::
  Display cards that you added first (have the earliest creation date) first.
 Order due ::
  Display cards with the earliest due date first.
 Latest seen first ::
  Display cards that you've seen most recently in reviews first.
 Relative overdueness ::
  Display cards that are most overdue in relation to their current interval
  first (for instance, a card with a current interval of 5 days overdue by 2
  days displays before a card with a current interval of 5 years overdue by a
  week). This is useful if you have a large backlog that may take some time to
  get through and want to review the cards you're most in danger of forgetting
  first.

== Steps & Returning ==

Please see the section on <<learning,learning>> as a reminder of how steps
work.

By default, Anki will use the steps of a card's home deck. If a new card would
normally be reviewed twice when being learnt, the same thing will happen
when you study it in a filtered deck.

Cards return to their home deck when (re)learning is complete. Thus if you
have 3 learning steps, a new card will return to its home deck upon three
presses of "Good" or a single press of "Easy".

The *custom steps* option allows you to override the home deck's
steps and provide your own steps instead. The provided steps apply to both
cards being learnt, lapsed reviews, and reviews ahead of time.

== Counts ==

In a filtered deck, reviews that were already due are displayed as the review
count as normal. Learning cards and non-due reviews are counted in the new
card count, due to how the underlying implementation works.

== Due Reviews ==

If the filtered deck includes cards that were due for review, they will be
shown like they would have been in their original deck - they appear in the
review card count at the bottom of the screen, and there are four choices for
how well you remembered. Upon a correct answer, the card will be moved back to
its home deck, and its next delay adjusted using the home deck's settings. If
you forget the card, it will be shown according to the relearning steps
defined in the home deck.

[[reviewingahead]]
== Reviewing Ahead ==

If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews
ahead of time.

Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how
early you are reviewing. If the cards were almost due to be shown,
they will be given a new delay similar to what they would have received if
you  had reviewed them on time. If the cards are reviewed soon after they
were scheduled however, their new delay will be similar to their previous
delay. This calculation works on a sliding scale.

NOTE: Because reviewing a card shortly after it is scheduled has little impact
on scheduling (eg, a card due tomorrow with a one day interval will remain due
tomorrow if reviewed early), *the "review early" custom study setting is not
appropriate for repeated use*. If used to go through a week's worth of cards
before a trip, the mature cards will be rescheduled into the future and the
new cards will remain at small intervals, because you don't know them well
enough for them to be rescheduled further. If you review early again the next
day, all you'll end up doing is going through those same new cards again, to
little benefit.

Early reviews are included in the new card count rather than the review count,
and will be shown according to the number of relearning steps defined in the
home deck (unless you have provided custom steps). This means that if you have
customized the number of relearning steps in the home deck, the non-due card
may be shown more than once.

If you have multiple steps, Anki will only consider the first answer when
deciding the next delay, and like relearning in normal decks, "Good" and
"Easy" differ only in the step change and not the resulting delay.

== Rescheduling ==

By default, Anki will return cards to their home decks with altered scheduling
based on your performance in the filtered deck. If you disable the *reschedule
cards based on my answers* option, Anki will return the cards in the same
state they were in when they were moved into the filtered deck. This is useful
for quickly flipping through material.

If you have disabled rescheduling, the "Good" and "Easy" buttons will display
no time above them when pressing them would cause the card to return to its
home deck with its original scheduling.

Please note that new cards are returned to the end of the new card queue,
rather than the start of it.

== Catching Up ==

Filtered decks can be useful for catching up when you've fallen behind in your
reviews. One Anki user describes the way they use the filtered decks to catch
up as follows:

++++++++
<i>
<p>I did this for a backlog of 800 cards with filtered subdecks. Worked very
well for me.

 <ol><li>Just Due filter with: "is:due prop:due>-7"
 <li>Over Due filter with: "is:due prop:due<=-7"</ol>

<p>The Just Due deck will then contain cards that became due in the past week.
That's the deck you should study every day as it gets the cards that become
due regularly. With this you can study as if there wasn't any backlog.

<p>The Over Due deck will contain your backlog, cards which you didn't study in
time. You can study them the same way you would study new cards. They go back
into the regular cards, so the number of overdue will never grow as long as
you keep your Just Due deck in check.

<p>How long it takes depends on how many overdue cards you study each day in
addition to the ones that become due regularly. You can still motor through
them when you feel like it - or you can do a specific number per day like you
would for new cards. Up to you.
</i>
+++++++++

= Leeches =

Leeches are cards that you keep on forgetting. Because they require so many
reviews, they take up a lot more of your time than other cards.

Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card 'lapses', a
counter is increased. When that counter reaches 8, the note is tagged as a
leech, and the card is suspended. The threshold, and whether to suspend or
not, can be adjusted in the <<deckoptions,deck options>>. 

Anki will continue to issue leech warnings periodically for a difficult card.
The warning interval is half the initial leech threshold. That is, if you have
Anki configured to warn at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4
lapses. (12, 16, etc)

Once a leech is found, there are a number of ways you can handle it.

Waiting
---------

Some leeches are caused by 'interference'. For example, an English learner
may have recently learnt the words "disappoint" and "disappear". As they look
similar, the learner may find themselves confusing the two when trying to
answer. In these situations, it's often productive to concentrate on just one
idea. When that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then return to
learning the other idea. So in these situations, you may want to leave one of
the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then
unsuspend it in the browser.

Deleting
---------

Another way to manage leeches is to delete them. Consider if the material
you're struggling with is important enough to make it worth your while. By
selectively deleting difficult and obscure items, you can dedicate more time
to learning other material, and studying becomes a lot more fun.

Editing
--------

Another approach is to change the way the information is presented. Perhaps
the cards you have created have too much information on them, or perhaps
you're trying to memorize something without fully understanding it. Sometimes
spending some time changing the way the card is phrased can help. It's also a
good time to think about making a mnemonic to help you remember.

[[importing]]
= Importing =

Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature,
Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files, and SuperMemo .xml files. To import a file, click the
File menu and then "Import".

== Importing text files ==

Any *plain text* file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or
tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met.

 * The files must be plain text (myfile.txt). Other formats like myfile.xls,
   myfile.rtf, myfile.doc must be saved as a plain text file first.
 * The files must be in UTF-8 format (see below)
 * Anki determines the number of fields in the file by looking at the first
   (non-commented) line. Any other lines in the file which don't match this
   number will be ignored.
 * The first line also defines the separating character - if Anki finds a ';'
   on the first line it will use that - if it finds a comma it'll use that,
   etc.

Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including
the tags field. You can choose which field in the text file corresponds to which
field in the note when you import.

When you import a text file, you can choose what deck to put the cards in. Keep
in mind that if you have the deck override option set for one or more of your
templates, the cards will go to that deck rather than the one you've selected.

This is an example of a valid file:

-----
foo bar; bar baz; baz quux
field1; field2; field3
-----

There are two ways to include newlines in fields.

*Escape the multi-lines*:

-----
hello [tab] "this is
a two line answer"
two [tab] this is a one line one
-----

*Use HTML new lines*:

-----
hello [tab] this is<br>a two line answer
two [tab] this is a one line one
-----

Note that you need to turn on the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox in the import
dialog for this to work.

You can also include tags in another field and select it as a tags field in the
import dialog:

-----
first field; second field; tags
-----

This is an example of a valid file where the first line is ignored (#):

-----
# this is a comment and is ignored
foo bar; bar baz; baz quux
field1; field2; field3
-----

== Spreadsheets and UTF-8 ==

If you have non-Latin characters in your file (such as accents, Japanese and so
on), Anki expects files to be saved in a 'UTF-8 encoding'. The easiest way to
do this is to use the free LibreOffice spreadsheet program instead of Excel to
edit your file, as it supports UTF-8 easily, and also exports multi-line
content properly, unlike Excel. If you wish to keep using Excel, please see
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12YE_FS6A9ANLTESJNtPP116ti4nNmCBghyoJBRtno_k/edit?usp=sharing[this
forum post] for more information.

To save your spreadsheet to a file Anki can read with LibreOffice, go to
File>Save As, and then select CSV for the type of file. After accepting the
default options, LibreOffice will save the file and you can then import the
saved file into Anki.

== HTML ==

Anki can treat text imported from text files as HTML (the language used for web
pages). This means that text with bold, italics and other formatting can be
exported to a text file and imported again. If you want to include HTML
formatting, you can check the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox when importing.
You may wish to turn this off if you're trying to import cards whose content
contains angle brackets or other HTML syntax.

If you wish to use HTML for formatting your file but also wish to include angle
brackets, you may write them differently:

 * For "<", use "&amp;lt;"
 * For ">", use "&amp;gt;"

== Importing Media ==

If you want to include audio and pictures from a text file import, copy the
files into the <<files,collection.media folder>>. *Do not put subdirectories
in the media folder, or some features will not work.*

After you've copied the files, change one of the fields in your text file as
follows.

-----
<img src="myimage.jpg">
-----

or

-----
[sound:myaudio.mp3]
-----

Alternatively, you can use the find & replace feature to update all the fields
at once. If each field contains text like "myaudio", and you wish to make it
play a sound, you'd search for (.*) and replace it with "[sound:\1.mp3]", with
the 'regular expressions' option enabled.

NOTE: When importing a text file with these references, you must make sure to
enable the "Allow HTML" option.

You might be tempted to do this in a template, like:

-----
<img src="{{field name}}">
-----

Anki doesn't support this for two reasons: searching for used media is
expensive, as each card has to be rendered, and such functionality isn't
obvious to shared deck users. Please use the find & replace technique instead.

== Adding Tags ==

If you want to add 'tag1' and 'tag2' to every line you're importing, add the
following to the top of the text file:

-----
tags:tag1 tag2
-----

== Duplicates and Updating ==

When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is
unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that
matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is
the same type as the type you're importing, the existing note's other fields
will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the
import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates
completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.

For info on how duplicates are handled in .apkg files, please see the
<<apkg-export,Deck Packages>> section below.

= Exporting =

Exporting allows you to save part of your collection as a text file or
packaged Anki deck. To export, click the File menu and choose 'Export'.

== Exporting Text ==

If you choose "Notes in Plain Text", Anki will write the contents of the notes
into a text file. Each field is separated by a tab. If you edit the resulting
file and don't modify the first field, you can later import that file back
into Anki and Anki will update your notes based on your edits, provided you
import back into the same note type.

If you find yourself needing to edit the first field as well, you'll need to
change the format of your note type so that the first field is an ID number
rather than actual text. (You can install the "Add note id" plugin to make
this easier.)

In order for formatting to be preserved when you import text back in, the text
is exported with all the HTML formatting embedded in it.

== Exporting Packaged Decks ==

A 'packaged deck' consists of cards, notes, note types and any sounds or
images bundled up into a file ending with .apkg. You can use packaged decks to
transfer cards between people, or for backing up parts of your collection. A
packaged deck is compressed, so it will be smaller than the sum of the files
in your profile folder.

There are two different kinds of packaged decks.

=== Collection Package ===

When you export all decks with scheduling included, this is called a
'collection package'. Anki will copy your entire collection into a file called
"collection.apkg", and place it on your desktop. A collection package is
used to back up your collection or to synchronize to AnkiMobile via iTunes.

When this file is later imported, Anki will delete all the current cards in
the collection, and replace the collection with the items in the
collection.apkg file. This is useful for copying your collection back and
forth between devices.

NOTE: Existing media in your collection is not deleted when you import a
collection.apkg. To delete unused media, use Tools>Unused Media.

NOTE: Anki's automatic backups are also collection packages. Simply double
click on one to restore your collection to that backup.

[[apkg-export]]
=== Deck Package ===

Deck packages contain a single deck (and any child decks it may have). They
have a filename ending with .apkg, but a filename other than collection.apkg.
When you import a deck package, Anki will add the contents into your
collection, rather than overwriting your collection. If some cards have
previously been imported, they will not be modified: deck packages only add
new items.

= Managing Files and Your Collection =

Checking Your Collection
--------------------------

It's a good idea to occasionally check your collection file for problems. You
can do this via the Tools>Check Database menu item. Checking the database
ensures the file is not corrupted, rebuilds some internal structures, and
optimizes the file.

When you check the database, your tag list is also rebuilt. When you delete
individual decks or cards, Anki does not update the list of used tags, as it's
inefficient to do so. If you want to clear old tags out from the list that are
no longer in use, checking your database is the way to do it.

Please note that Anki will automatically optimize your collection once every 2
weeks. This optimization ensures the collection performs well, but it does not
check for errors or rebuild the tag list when automatically optimizing.

[[files]]
File Locations
---------------

On Windows and OSX, Anki stores all of its files in an Anki folder, located in
your Documents folder. On other operating systems, your files are stored in
~/Anki by default.

Within the Anki folder, the program-level and profile-level preferences are
stored in a file called prefs.db.

There is also a separate folder for each profile. The folder contains:

 * Your notes, decks, cards and so on in a file called collection.anki2
 * Your audio and images in a collection.media folder
 * A backups folder
 * Some system files

WARNING: You should never copy or move your collection while Anki is open.
Doing so could cause your collection to become corrupted. Please don't
move or modify the other files in the folder either.

NOTE: On Unix systems, Anki deliberately uses ~/Anki rather than a hidden
folder. The bulk of the data stored in that folder is important user data
rather than easily restored preferences, and it would be a disaster if a user
lost it because they overlooked it when backing up files. There are also more
and more Linux users who are not familiar with hidden folders. If you're an
advanced user, you can specify a custom folder with a command line argument,
described in the next section.

[[startupopts]]
Startup Options
----------------

If you have made a destructive change on one computer and have an undamaged
copy on another computer, you may wish to start Anki without syncing in order
to use the full sync option without first downloading the changes. Similarly,
if you are experiencing problems with Anki, you might want to (or might be
instructed to) disable add-ons temporarily to see if one might be causing the
problem. You can do both of these things by holding down the Shift key while
starting Anki.

You can specify a custom folder location by starting Anki with a command line
like so:

-----
anki -b /path/to/anki/folder
-----

* If you have multiple profiles, you can pass -p to load a specific
  profile.
* To change the interface language, use -l <iso 639-1 language code>,
  such as "-l ja" for Japanese.

If you always want to use a custom folder location, you can modify your
shortcut to Anki. On Windows, right-click on the shortcut, choose Properties,
select the Shortcut tab, and add "-b \path\to\data\folder" after the path to
the program, which should leave you with something like

-----
"C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe" -b "C:\AnkiDataFolder"
-----

You can also use this technique with the -l option to easily use Anki in
different languages.

NOTE: On Windows, you should use a backslash (\) not a forward slash (/).

WARNING: If you place the Anki folder on a network drive or synced folder like
Dropbox or Google Drive, if the synced service makes a mistake, your collection
is likely to become corrupted. Regular DB checks are recommended, or better
yet, make a script which copies the collection from the shared folder to the
local disk before running Anki, and moves it back when you're done.

NOTE: If you want to permanently change the interface language, delete
Documents/Anki/prefs.db and the initial startup screen will be shown
again. After doing so, you'll need to add any profiles you were using again.
As long as you use the same profile name as before, Anki will pick up the
files from before.

Running from a Flash Drive
---------------------------

Anki can be installed on a flash drive and run as a portable application:

 * Copy the \Program Files\Anki folder to the flash drive, so you have a
   folder like G:\Anki.
 * Create a text file called G:\anki.bat with the following text:

-----
\anki\anki.exe -b \ankidata
-----

If you would like to prevent the black command prompt window from remaining
open, you can instead use:

-----
start /b \anki\anki.exe -b \ankidata
-----

 * Double-clicking on anki.bat should start Anki with the user data stored in
   G:\ankidata.

NOTE: Media syncing with AnkiWeb may not work if your flash drive is formatted
as FAT32. Please format the drive as NTFS to ensure media syncs correctly.

Backups
---------

Each time your collection is closed (when closing Anki, switching profiles, or
synchronizing your deck), Anki exports your collection into the backups
folder. By default Anki will store up to 30 backups; you can adjust this in
the <<preferences,preferences>>.

Automatic backups do not protect against disk or computer failure, and do not
extend to your media. To keep your collections safe, please consider making
manual backups too.

The easiest way to take a manual backup is to back up your entire Anki folder.
Please make sure you close Anki first, as backups may be corrupt if run while
Anki is open.

To restore from a backup, simply close Anki, open Documents/Anki/<profile
name>/backups, and double-click on the most recent backup in order to import
it. This will overwrite your whole collection with the backup copy. If you need
to import only part of a backup (for instance, a single deck you messed up),
you can do so by creating a new <<profiles,profile>> and importing the backup
into there, then exporting the deck you want to restore and importing it into
the other profile.

Anki also logs deleted notes to a text file called deleted.txt in your profile
folder. These notes are in a text format that can be read by File>Import,
though please note the import feature only supports a single note type at one
time, so if you have deleted notes from different note types, you'll need to
split the file into separate files for each note type first.

Inaccessible Harddisk
----------------------

If Anki can't write to files in the <<files,Anki folder>>, a message will be
displayed on startup saying that Anki can't write to the harddisk, and Anki
will close. If you're unsure how to fix the permissions, please contact
someone near you who is knowledgable about computers and can help you out.

Permissions of Temp Folder
---------------------------

Anki uses the system's temporary folder to store temporary data. If the
permissions of this folder have been changed from the default settings by a
rogue app or buggy antivirus app, Anki will not function properly.

If you're on a Windows 7 machine, the general steps to fix the problem are
listed below. As this is somewhat complicated, please ask someone knowledgeable
about Windows if you are not sure.

. Click on the start bar, and type in %temp% (including the percents), then
hit enter.
. Go up one folder, and locate the temp folder. Right click on it, and choose
Properties.
. In the security tab, click on Advanced.
. Click on the Owner tab. If you're not listed as the owner, click the button
  to take ownership.
. On the permissions tab, ensure that you have full control. On a default W7
install the control will actually be inherited from c:\users\your-username.

Corrupt Collections
---------------------

Anki uses a file format that is robust against program and computer crashes,
but it's still possible for your collection to become corrupt if the files are
modified while Anki is open, stored on a network drive, or corrupted by a bug.

When you run Tools>Check Database, you will receive a message if Anki detects
the file has been corrupted. The best way to recover from this is to restore
from the most recent automatic backup, but if your backup is too old, then you
can attempt to repair the corruption instead.

On Linux, make sure sqlite3 is installed. On a Mac, it should be installed
already. On Windows, download http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3_6_23.zip.

Next, create a backup of your collection.anki2 file, in case something goes
wrong with the steps below.

*Linux/OSX*

Open a terminal, change to the folder your collection is located in, and type:

-----
sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt
-----

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line.
If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

-----
cat dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file
-----

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you
will blank out the file. When you're done, proceed to the final step.

*Windows*

Copy the `sqlite3.exe` program and your deck to your desktop. Then go to
*Start>Run* and type in `cmd.exe`.

If you're on a recent Windows, the command prompt may not start on your
desktop. If you don't see desktop displayed in the command prompt, type
something like the following, replacing 'administrator' with your login name.

-----
cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop
-----

Then type:

-----
sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt
-----

Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line.
If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"

Then run the following in a terminal:

-----
type dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file
-----

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you
will blank out the file. When you're done, proceed to the final step.

*Final Step*

Check that you didn't get an error message, and that temp.file is not empty.
The procedure optimizes the collection in the process, so it's normal for the
new file to be somewhat smaller than the old one.

When you've confirmed the file is not empty, copy it over collection.anki2,
making sure you still have a backup of the original version. Then start Anki
and go to Tools>Check Database to make sure the collection has been
successfully restored.

[[stats]]
Graphs and Statistics
=====================

Card Info
----------

You can display information about a card by clicking the Info button in the
toolbar while browsing. Most of the displayed information should be
self-explanatory. A few notes:

 Position ::
  Only shown when the card is new, it shows the order the card will appear in
  relative to other new cards. The position can be changed in the browser.
 Interval ::
  The delay from one review to the next. Times are abbreviated; "0s, 1m, 3h, 4d,
  5mo, 6y" refers to seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years
  respectively.
 Ease ::
  The approximate amount the interval will grow when you answer a review card
  with the "Good" button.

Statistics
-----------

The statistics window is accessed by clicking on the graphs icon in the top
right of the main window, or by pressing Shift+S. The statistics window will
show statistics from the currently selected deck and any subdecks. If you
click on "collection" on the bottom left, statistics will be shown for your
entire collection instead.

By default Anki will show you statistics for the previous month. You can change
this to a year scope or deck life scope at the bottom. (The "today" section at
the top is of course unaffected by this selection.)

Clicking on "Save Image" will save an image of the statistics to a file on your
desktop to make it easy to share your statistics with others.

NOTE: When you delete notes, their review history is maintained in Anki. It
will not be included when looking at statistics for a specific deck (as Anki
has no way of knowing which deck the deleted cards belonged to), but will be
included when you look at statistics for the whole collection.

[[cardtypedefinitions]]
Types of Cards
---------------
The stats window uses some terms that you may not be familiar with:

 Mature ::
  A mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater.
 Young ::
  A young card is one that has an interval of less than 21 days, but is not in
  learning.
 Learn ::
  A learning card is one that is still in learning mode (using whatever steps
  may be defined in the deck's options).
 Relearn ::
  A relearning card is a card that you have failed in review mode, thus
  returning it to learning mode to be relearned.
 Unseen ::
  An unseen card is one that has been added to your collection but has not yet
  entered learning mode. Unseen cards are sometimes referred to as "new"
  cards, especially when they are in the "new" queue to be shown for the first
  time.

The Graphs
-----------

 Forecast ::
  This graph shows an estimated number of reviews that will be due on a given
  day in the future if you learn no new cards and fail no cards. The bars and
  the left axis show the number of cards due on each day if you study all cards
  each day, while the line and the right axis show the number of cards due on
  that day if you don't study at all until then. Note that the forecast graph
  does not count reviews that are currently overdue, so if you have a large
  backlog, the overdue cards will not be displayed.
 Review Count ::
  This graph shows how many cards you have studied in the past. The bars may
  correspond to days, weeks, or months, depending on the time period you've
  selected at the bottom of the screen. The differently colored blocks show how
  many of the cards you answered on each day were <<cardtypedefinitions,mature>>, young,
  relearning, or learning cards. There is also a separate group for cards
  answered in a filtered/cram deck while they were not due. The line and the
  right axis shows the cumulative total for each type of review as time
  progresses across the graph (so at 0 days, it would display the number for the
  entire time period displayed on the graph).
 Review Time ::
  This graph works exactly like Review Count, except that it deals with the
  amount of time you spent on each card rather than the number of cards
  answered.
 Intervals ::
  This graph displays the number of cards that have a given interval (the delay
  between two reviews). The line and the right axis tell you what percentage of
  your cards have an interval of less than or equal to the time below that
  point. The time scope has a different effect on this graph than other graphs:
  rather than changing which cards or period of studying is included, it limits
  how far out the intervals are displayed to (so 14-month intervals are not
  displayed at all on a 1-year graph).
 Hourly Breakdown ::
  This graph shows what percentage of total reviews you have passed (i.e., not
  pressed Again on) during given hours. The larger, darker bars and left axis show
  the success rate; the thinner, lighter bars and right axis show the number of
  reviews you've made at that hour (so you know how significant the results
  are).
 Answer Buttons ::
  This graph shows how many times you've chosen the Again, Hard, Good, or Easy
  button while studying learning/new, young, and <<cardtypedefinitions,mature>> cards. Anki
  also displays the percentage of correct reviews for each type of card.
 Cards Types ::
  This pie chart shows what percentage of your deck or collection consists of
  mature, unseen, young/learn, and suspended cards. If you wish to calculate a
  more precise percentage, the key shows the exact number of cards in each
  section, and the total number of cards is displayed to the side.


[[media]]
= Media =

Anki stores the sounds and images used in your notes in a folder next to the
collection. For more on the folder location, please see the <<files,file
locations>> section. When you add media within Anki, Anki will copy it from its
original location into the media folder. This makes it easy to back up your
collection's media or move it to another computer.

You can use the Tools>Unused Media menu option to scan your notes and media
folder. It will generate a report of files in the media folder that are not
used by any notes, and media referenced in notes but missing from your media
folder. It does not scan question or answer templates, which is why you can't
place media references to fields in the template. If you need a static image or
sound on every card, name it with a leading _ (eg _dog.jpg) to tell Anki to
ignore it when checking for media. If you delete media using the unused media
check, Anki will move it into your operating system's trash folder, so you can
recover if you accidentally delete media that shouldn't have been deleted.

Anki uses a program called mplayer in order to support sounds and videos. A
wide variety of file formats are supported, but not all of these formats will
work on AnkiWeb and the mobile clients. MP3 audio and MP4 video seems to be
the most universally supported.

[[latex]]
= LaTeX support =

LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system, which is ideal for entering
mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, musical notation and so on. Anki
provides some support for LaTeX, allowing you to enter LaTeX code in your
notes. When you review a card, Anki will call LaTeX and display the generated
image instead.

Installing and Assumed Knowledge
---------------------------------
Anki's LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use
LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have no experience with
LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides available on the internet. If you
are having trouble with markup, please ask on a LaTeX forum.

To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on Linux use
your distro's package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.

NOTE: On Windows, go to Settings in MikTek's maintenance window, and make sure
"Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "No", not to "Ask me first".
If you continue to have difficulties, one user reported that running Anki as
an administrator until all the packages were fetched helped.

NOTE: On OSX, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTex and BasicTex. If you use
BasicTex, you need to install dvipng separately, with the following command:
tlmgr update --self && tlmgr install dvipng

NOTE: If you are not using the above LaTeX packages, you will need to
use the "edit LaTeX" add-on to specify the full path to latex and dvipng.

LaTeX on Web/Mobile
--------------------

When you review a card with LaTeX on it, Anki will generate an image for that
LaTeX and place the image in your collection's media folder for future use.
The web & mobile clients will display these images if they already exist, but
can not generate the images on their own.

To avoid having to review all your cards at least once before you can study on
the other clients, Anki can generate the images in bulk for you. To generate
all the images, please go to Tools>Unused Media. After that, syncing should
upload the generated media to AnkiWeb and the other clients.

Example
--------

The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with
[latex][/latex] tags. There's a shortcut button for this documented in the
<<editor,editor>> section.

For example, entering the following on the front of an Anki flashcard:

-----
Does [latex]\begin{math}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{math}[/latex] converge?
-----

will produce this when the flashcard is viewed:

image:img/convergence_question.png[]

The formula in the example above is called a 'text formula', because it is displayed right within the non-mathematical text.  In contrast, the following example shows a 'displayed formula':

-----
Does the sum below converge?

[latex]\begin{displaymath}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{displaymath}[/latex]
-----

image:img/convergence_question_2.png[]

'Text formulas' and 'display formulas' are the most common type of LaTeX
 expressions, so Anki provides abbreviated versions of them.  Expressions of
 the form:

-----
[latex]\begin{math}...\end{math}[/latex]
-----

can be shortened to

-----
[$]...[/$]
-----

and expressions of the form

-----
[latex]\begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}[/latex]
-----

can be shortened to

----
[$$]...[/$$]
----

For example, the two LaTeX snippets shown before are equivalent to

-----
Does [$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$] converge?
-----

and

-----
Does the sum below converge?

[$$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$$]
-----

respectively.

LaTeX packages
---------------

Anki allows you to customize the LaTeX preamble so you can import custom
packages for chemistry, music and so on. For example, imagine you find an
example file for chemtex on the internet:

-----
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
\usepackage{chemtex}
\begin{document}

\initial
\begin{figure}[h]\centering
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}}
\hfil
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\cbranch{H}{S}{H}{S}{C}{S}{}{S}{H}
  \xi=-200 \cright{}{Q}{C}{D}{O}{S}{OH}}
\hfil
\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\hetisix{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{O}{Q}{O}
  \xi=-171 \fuseup{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}}
\caption{Chemie mit {\tt CHEMTEX}\label{a1}}
\end{figure}

\end{document}
-----

Firstly, follow the documentation of the package and MiKTeX/MacTex in order to
install the package. To check the package is working, you'll want to put code
like the above into a .latex file and test you can compile it from the command
line. Once you've confirmed that the package is available and working, we can
integrate it with Anki.

To use the package with Anki, click "Add" in the main window, then click the
note type selection button. Click the "Manage" button, then select the note type
you plan to use and click "Options". The LaTeX header and footer are shown. The
header will look something like:

-----
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
\begin{document}
-----

To use chemtex, you'd add the usepackage line in the earlier example, so it
looks like:

-----
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\special{papersize=3in,5in}
\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
\usepackage{chemtex}
\pagestyle{empty}
\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
\begin{document}
-----

After that, you should be able to include lines like the following in your
Anki cards:

-----
[latex]\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}[/latex]
-----

== LaTeX Conflicts ==

It's not uncommon for {{ and }} to pop up in LaTeX code when writing
mathematical equations. To ensure that your LaTeX equations don't conflict
with Anki's field replacements, it's possible to change the separator to
something else.

For example, if you have a template:

-----
{{latex field}}
-----

Changing it to the following will make it unlikely that the LaTeX will
conflict:

-----
{{=<% %>=}}
<%latex field%>
-----

While this most commonly occurs with LaTeX, the solution presented here will
work in any situation where you need to include {{ }} on cards, regardless of
whether LaTeX is used or not.

When using cloze deletions, you cannot change the double braces used to mark
cloze deletions; instead, you can put a space between any double closing braces
that do not indicate the end of the cloze, so

-----
{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz}}[/$] blah blah blah.}}
-----

will not work, but

-----
{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz} }[/$] blah blah blah.}}
-----

will (and LaTeX ignores spaces in math mode, so your equation will render the same).


Unsafe commands
-----------------

Anki prohibits certain commands like \input from being used on cards or in
templates, because to allow them could allow malicious shared decks to damage
your system. If you need these commands, please add them to a system package,
and import that package as described in the previous section.

= Miscellanea =

== Menu Shortcuts ==

On Windows/Linux you can hold down the alt key and press a highlighted letter
to activate a particular menu.

OS X doesn't support this feature, but it does allow you to assign shortcuts
to specific menu items instead. Please see
http://lifehacker.com/343328/create-a-keyboard-shortcut-for-any-menu-action-in-any-program
for more information.

[[debug]]
== Debug Console ==

Sometimes you may be asked to use the debug console to change a setting or
check something. Unless asked to enter text in the "debug console", you will
probably not need this. Advanced users may like to read more about it in the
add-ons page, linked below.

When asked to enter text into the "debug console", please start Anki, and in
the main window, press Ctrl+: (that is the control key and colon key at the
same time), or on a Mac, Command+: (command key and colon key at the same
time). When you do so, a new window should pop up.

In the window that has popped up, please paste the text you were asked to
paste in the top section. When you've done so, please press Ctrl+Return
(Command+Return on a Mac), and some text should appear in the bottom section.
If you've been asked to paste the resulting output, please copy it from the
bottom area, and paste it back to the support person.

= Add-ons =

Anki's capabilities can be extended with add-ons. Add-ons can provide features
like extra support for specific languages, extra control over scheduling, and
so on.

To browse the list of available add-ons, select the Tools>Add-ons>Browse &
Install menu item. You can also use Tools>Add-ons to check which add-ons are
installed.

Some add-ons have options or customizations that are only accessible by
editing them. To edit an add-on, go to Tools>Add-ons>[add-on name]>Edit.
Please be careful when editing - special characters and whitespace is
important, so if you see something like:

-----
    line1
    line2
    line3
-----

...and you accidentally change it to the following, Anki will throw an error
when it is restarted:

-----
    line1
   line2
    line3
-----

Many add-on authors include their email address in the add-on, so if you need
to get in touch with the author, editing the add-on and looking at the top of
the file may help.

If you have downloaded an add-on that is not working properly, or if you
accidentally made a mistake when editing an add-on, you can use the "Delete"
option in the menu to remove it.

To learn how to write your own add-ons, please see the link:addons.html[add-on writing guide].

= Contributing =

[[sharingdecks]]
Sharing Decks Publicly
-----------------------

To share decks with other people, <<syncing,synchronize>> them with AnkiWeb,
then log into AnkiWeb and click on "Share" from the menu next to the deck you
wish to share.

If you shared a deck previously (including with previous versions of Anki),
you can update it by clicking "Share" as above. Please ensure the name of the
deck in your account exactly matches the name shown in the shared deck
listing, or you'll end up creating a new shared deck rather than updating the
old one. Updating a shared deck will not reset the download counts or ratings.
You can delete a shared deck that you have uploaded using the Delete button on
the shared deck's page.

NOTE: When updating a deck, AnkiWeb expects the deck to be at the same
location as before. If you shared a deck when it was called "Korean Verbs" for
example, and then renamed it to "Korean::Korean Verbs", resharing will not be
able to update the existing copy.

Sharing Decks Privately
------------------------

To share a deck privately, use File>Export and export in the packaged Anki
deck format (including media if necessary). You can then place the resulting
deck.apkg file on a private website for people to download, or mail it to the
relevant people.

Both desktop and mobile clients make it easy to import from an apkg file
simply by clicking on it. AnkiWeb does not have the ability to import apkg
files however, so the recipients of your deck will need to have the desktop
client or Anki on their smartphone.

When a user imports a .apkg file, cards that already exist in their collection
will be ignored and any new cards will be added. As long as they use the same
note type, modified cards will also be updated. To prevent data loss, cards
that have been deleted in the new apkg file will not be deleted in the user's
collection, so if you need to delete cards from users' decks for whatever
reason, you will need to contact them about it.

Sharing Add-ons
----------------

Please see the add-on documentation above.

App Translations
-----------------

Translations can be done directly from the 
https://translations.launchpad.net/anki/trunk[translation website].

Launchpad will guess which languages you can translate based on the country
you're connecting from. If the language you want to translate to doesn't
appear, sign up for a launchpad account, and in your profile, click the '!'
next to preferred languages to the language you want to translate.

There are some special markers in text that you need to be aware of, and
careful when translating:

 * A string like `Cards: %d` or `Error: %s` means that the %d/%s part will be
   replaced with some other value. The characters must remain the same in the
   translation, so a translation may look like `カード: %d`.
 * The same applies to text like `%(a)d of %(b)d` - it would be
   translated like `%(a)d von %(b)d`. If you need to reverse A and B in your
   language, that's fine as long as the text remains the same. 
 * Menu items have an & to indicate which character is the shortcut key, such
   as `&File`. In languages that use roman text, you can place the & over
   a different character such as `&Datei`; in other languages there may be a
   different convention. Japanese for example includes the roman character
   afterwards instead, like `ファイル (&F)`
 * Some strings have plural support, so that "0 cards", "1 card", "5 cards"
   can be represented properly in your language. In these instances you'll
   need to enter the 2 or 3 different forms.

Sometimes it will not be clear what a string refers to, and you may want to
see the context. Below every string to be translated, you'll see a line like
this:

-----
Located in ../dtop/aqt/deckbrowser.py:299
-----

If you strip off the first "../dtop" section, you're left with something like
"aqt/deckbrowser.py:299". You can then visit https://github.com/dae/anki/,
locate the same filename, and click on it. The file will be displayed with
line numbers on the left, and by matching up the line numbers (they may differ
by a few lines sometimes), you may be able to get a better understanding of
what the string refers to.

If you see 'forms' in the string like the above example, the strings will
generally be obvious. If you do need to understand the context however, things
are a little more complicated, as those files are automatically generated from
an interface description instead. Please go to
https://github.com/dae/anki/tree/master/designer and locate the same
filename and click on it. We can't rely on line numbers in this case, so
please use the browser's find option to find the string in the file. The lines
immediately surrounding the found text may give a clue as to its meaning.

If you find a string that you're unsure how to translate, or would like to
start a discussion with fellow native speakers on the best way to translate
something, please feel free to start a thread in the Anki forums.

Any translations that were made at least a few hours before a new Anki release
are automatically included in the next release. If you'd like to see your name
in the About screen as a contributor, please drop Damien a line.

If you'd like to try out your translations without waiting for a new release,
you can export a .mo file from the translation website. If you then move that
.mo file into Anki's installation folder, overwriting an existing .mo file
with the same language code (in the locale folder), Anki will display the new
translations when it is next started.

Translating the Manual
-----------------------

If you're a fairly technical user, you may want to translate the
https://raw.github.com/dae/ankidocs/master/manual.txt[source file] of the
manual, and compile it yourself with asciidoc. You can also use that github
repo to keep track of changes to the manual in the future.

If that sounds complicated, an easier way is to visit this page and use
File>Save As to save the manual to disk. You can then import it into Microsoft
Word or similar software, and translate it that way.

When you're happy with the translation, you can either put it up on your
website and I can link to it, or I can host the translated file on Anki's
website (but if you're planning to make frequent updates, the former is a
better choice).

Contributing Code
-------------------

Anki's source code is available at http://github.com/dae

If you have bugfixes or believe your changes would benefit many people, please
have a look at the LICENSE file, and if you agree to the license, drop Damien
an email or a Github pull request.

Frequently Asked Questions
===========================

== I haven't studied for a while, and now the next due times are too big! ==

When you use Anki every day, each time a card is answered correctly, it gets a
bigger interval. Let's assume that 'good' about doubles the interval. Thus you
have a 5 day wait, then a 10 day wait, 20 days, 40 days, and so on.

When people return to their deck after weeks or months of no study, they're
often surprised by the length intervals have grown to. This is because Anki
considers the actual time the card was unseen, not just the time it was
scheduled for. Thus if the card was scheduled for 5 days but you didn't study
for a month, the next interval will be closer to 60 days than 10 days.

This is a good thing. If you have successfully remembered a card after a one
month wait, chances are you'll remember it again after a longer wait, too. The
same principles which make SRS effective in normal use apply when you're
studying after a delay, too. It also makes little sense to schedule a card for
10 days in the future if you were able to easily answer it after a whole
month's wait - you'd be going backwards.

Resetting the deck is an even worse solution. When returning to a deck after a
long absence, you may have forgotten many of your cards, but chances are you
haven't forgotten them all. Resetting the entire deck means you have to waste
time studying material you already know.

Now you may find overdue cards that you were able to recall, but not
comfortably, since they were not reviewed when they should have been. To
counter this, Anki treats the delay differently depending on your answer. If
you find a card easy, the last interval plus the full delay are added together,
and then used to calculate the next interval. When you answer good, only half
the delay is used. And when you answer hard, only a quarter of the delay is
used. So if a card was due in 5 days, and it's answered 20 days late, the next
times you'd end up with are approximately:

 * Hard: (5 + 20/4) * 1.2 = 12 days
 * Good: (5 + 20/2) * 2.5 = 37.5 days
 * Easy: (5 + 20) * 3.25 = 81.25 days

(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)

If you find a card hard, the next interval is quite conservative and is less
than the last wait (25 days). If you find it good, the next interval is only
about 50% higher. And easy increases the interval aggressively as usual.

So it is recommended that you study as normal when you return to Anki after a
period of absence. But if you absolutely must reset the deck, you can select
the cards to reset in the browser, and use Edit>Reschedule.

== Can I do multiple-choice questions? ==

Multiple choice questions are a poor review tool for a number of reasons.
The reason they are commonly used in an academic setting is because they are
easy to mark, and they allow the person studying to demonstrate their ability
to recognize the correct answer even if they can't produce it themselves.

Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" -
answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for
similary spelt words, but it is not capable of chosing good distractors for
more complicated topics.

If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple
choice question like the following:

-----
Q: What animal has a really long neck?

A: 1. A monkey. 2. A giraffe. 3. A donkey. 4. A snail.
-----

Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:

-----
Q: What animal has a really long neck?

A: A giraffe.
-----

Or you can add your own choices:

-----
Q: What animal has a really long neck? (dog/cat/giraffe/penguin)

A: A giraffe.
-----

== Can I link cards together? Add dependencies? How should I handle synonyms? ==

Anki supports links between cards of a note, but not between unrelated cards.
Imagine are you studying Japanese and aiming to be able to both recognize and
reproduce the Japanese. You may enter the word "ookii", which means "big", and
tell Anki to generate two cards - ookii->big and big->ookii.

In the above situation Anki can space reviews of those two sibling cards out
so that they don't appear one after the other (see "delayed cards" in the link
at the top of this document).

Some people want to extend this link between arbitrary cards. They want to be
able to tell Anki "after showing me this card, show me that card", or "don't
show me that card until I know this card well enough". This might sound like a
nice idea in theory, but in practice it is not practical.

For one, unlike the sibling card case above, you would have to define all the
relations yourself. Entering new notes into Anki would become a complicated
process, as you'd have to search through the rest of the deck and assign
relationships between the old and new material.

Secondly, remember that Anki is using an algorithm to determine when the
optimum time to show you material again is. Adding constraints to card display
that cause cards to display earlier or later than they were supposed to will
make the spaced repetition system less effective, leading to more work than
necessary, or forgotten cards.

The most effective way to use Anki is to make each note you see independent
from other notes. Instead of trying to join similar words together, you'll be
better off if you can determine the differences between them. Synonyms are
rarely completely interchangeable - they tend to have nuances attached, and
it's not unusual for a sentence to become strange if one synonym is replaced
with another.

Continuing with the Japanese example earlier, imagine you want to learn the
word "dekai", which also roughly translates to "big", but is a more colloquial
expression. If you still want to review in both directions, you might make the
English prompt of this word "big (more casual)". The further you progress in
your language studies though, the more of a burden it becomes to define the
differences between similar words, which is why cards asking you to produce a
particular word are best left to the early stage of your studies. With a
strong base vocabulary, moving towards recognition-based study makes more
sense, as we all have a much larger passive vocabulary than our active
vocabulary.

As for ensuring that difficult material is introduced after easier material, a
number of existing tools are available. New cards are by default introduced in
the order they are added to the deck, so as long as the learning materials or
sources of information you are using are adequately graded for your level,
material should appear in order of easiness.

== Can I give my notes an arbitrary number of fields? ==

Notes are designed to represent 'closely' related information, and to make it
easy to reorganize where that information appears on a card. In the context of
language learning, notes are useful for representing things like a
phrase-translation pair, a phrase-translation-reading triplet, and so
on. All of these relationships are 1:1 - a given phrase has only one reading,
and one translation. (1)

Because of their ability to tie related pieces of information together, some
people try to use notes to tie less closely related information in their deck
together. For example, if they come across two sentences with the word
"completely":

 * He was completely confused.
 * That was completely uncalled for.

Then they put those two sentences in the same note, under the rationale that
since they share a word, they are related. But what if the user comes across
another example sentence?

 * The book confused her.

That sentence shares the word "confused" with a previous sentence. So should
it be in the note for "confused"? Or the note for "completely"? Or both?

Unlike the phrase-translation pairs mentioned above, if you say sentences
are related if they share a word, then sentences have a many:many
relationship. That is, sentence A may be related to sentence B and C, sentence
B may be related to A and D, and so on. Because the relationships are complex
and overlapping, notes are not a good way to represent them.

There seem to be two main reasons people try to represent such relationships
in notes:

 * "Because it's neater to keep all the information in one place". This may
   seem to be the case, but in reality you really don't save much. If you want
   to see all example sentences that contain the word "completely" and each
   sentence is in a different note, all you have to do is search for
   "completely".

 * "Because I want Anki to separate reviews of cards that share the same
   word". This is related to the previous FAQ question. Defining the links
   between cards is time consuming, and if it were done automatically and
   every card that shared a word were separated from other cards that shared a
   word, it would be both computationally prohibitive, and would likely lead
   to a situation where nothing could be shown because it was all related to
   something else. Yes, it's not ideal for two sentences containing the same
   word to be shown right after each other, but if you add new cards in a
   random order such a situation is unlikely, and the downsides of trying to
   prevent such a situation aren't worth it. And even if such a solution were
   introduced, it wouldn't stop you from encountering the words in the real
   world.

(1) It is possible for different people to translate the same phrase in
  different ways, and different dialects may read the same word differently,
  but that is not relevant to the discussion.

== Can I host my own AnkiWeb? ==

Sorry, AnkiWeb is only available as a hosted service.

== Why is the Android version free when the iPhone version isn't? ==

Working on Anki desktop, AnkiWeb and AnkiMobile is my full time job, and I
need some way of paying the bills. Since I make the desktop & web versions
available for free, I rely on sales of the iPhone app in order to finance
development.

AnkiDroid is written by a separate group of volunteers. Since they based it on
the free desktop version I make available (and rely on AnkiWeb in order to
synchronize decks), they decided to make it freely available as well.

== What spaced repetition algorithm does Anki use? ==

Anki was originally based on the SuperMemo SM5 algorithm. However, Anki's
default behaviour of revealing the next interval before answering a card
revealed some fundamental problems with the SM5 algorithm. The key difference
between SM2 and later revisions of the algorithm is this:

 * SM2 uses your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule
   that card
 * SM3+ use your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule
   that card, and similar cards

The latter approach promises to choose more accurate intervals by factoring in
not just a single card's performance, but the performance as a group. If you
are very consistent in your studies and all cards are of a very similar
difficulty, this approach can work quite well. However, once inconsistencies
are introduced into the equation (cards of varying difficulty, not studying at
the same time every day), SM3+ is more prone to incorrect guesses at the next
interval - resulting in cards being scheduled too often or too far in the
future.

Furthermore, as SM3+ dynamically adjusts the "optimum factors" table, a
situation can often arise where answering "hard" on a card can result in a
longer interval than answering "easy" would give. The next times are hidden
from you in SuperMemo so the user is never aware of this.

After evaluating the alternatives, the Anki author decided that near-optimum
intervals yielded by an SM2 derivative are better than trying to obtain
optimum intervals at the risk of incorrect guesses. An SM2 approach is
predictable and intuitive to end users, whereas an SM3+ approach hides the
details from the user and requires users to trust the system (even when the
system may make mistakes in the scheduling).

Anki's algorithm is based on SM2, but differs from it in some respects.

 * SM2 defines an initial interval of 1 day then 6 days. With Anki, you have
   full control over the length of the initial learning steps. Anki
   understands that it can be necessary to see a new card a number of times
   before you're able to memorize it, and those initial "failures" don't mean
   you need to be punished by being shown the failed card many times over
   the course of a few days. Performance during the learning stage does not
   reflect performance in the retaining stage.

 * Anki uses 4 choices for answering review cards, not 6. There is only one
   'fail' choice, not 3. The reason for this is that failure comprises a small
   amount of total reviews, and thus adjusting a card's ease can be
   sufficiently done by simply varying the positive answers.

 * Answering cards later than scheduled will be factored into the next
   interval calculation, so you receive a boost to cards that you were late in
   answering but still remembered.

 * Like SM2, Anki's failure button resets the card interval by default. But
   the user can choose to make the card take some steps back rather than being
   reset completely. Also, you can elect to review failed mature cards on a
   different day, instead of the same day.

 * 'Remembered easily' not only increments the ease factor, but adds an extra
   bonus to the current interval calculation. Thus, answering 'remembered
   easily' is a little more aggressive than the standard SM2 algorithm.

 * Successive failures while cards are in learning do not result in further
   decreases to the card's ease. A common complaint with the standard SM
   algorithms is that repeated failings of a card cause the card to get stuck
   in "low interval hell". In Anki, the initial acquisition process does not
   influence a card's ease.

For a description of the SM2 algorithm, please see
http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm

= Resources =

The SuperMemo site has a lot of good information about spaced repetition and
memory: http://www.supermemo.com/