Format of new flashcards?

wibr

进士
With new, more powerful flashcards right around the corner (right? ;-)) I am curious about the format for sharing and editing. Will it remain csv with tabs for simple things and xml for everything else? Or something more lightweight like json for a subset?
What I would really like to see is a way to give each flashcard entry an id that can be used match cards for import/export even though their content changed. E.g. even though I might change all aspects of a card, it might still be the same card, so I want it to replace the previous version and use the existing SRS scores. Will that be possible?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Hadn't really considered that specific case, to be honest - I agree it would make sense (and matches up with some thing we do externally) but it might be problematic to craft a good user interface for it.

We certainly do plan to keep supporting tab-delimited text for list imports, though.
 

wibr

进士
I think it would be enough to provide the option during import to select a custom field for matching cards. So everyone who wants to do this can just write some kind of id into this field which never changes. Since you want to provide custom fields anway at some point, the overhead should be pretty low?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well we hadn't been planning to add a feature to guarantee uniqueness of custom fields, so there'd still be a good bit of overhead either for adding that feature (so that a custom field can constitute a unique ID) or for letting people find / disambiguate duplicated fields. Would not be dissimilar to the code for duplicate card management now but still some extra work.
 

wibr

进士
Ok seems that I underestimated the amount of work that would go into such a feature. The motivation is that I'd like my flashcards to be less static, so that I can make small changes on the go, add and delete cards, then export (maybe even synchronize) the new dataset to my computer, run a script to add pictures, additional information or whatever, back to the phone without worrying about duplicates or losing SRS scores. I will also use more sentences in the future, and correcting errors or making small changes in those sentences might change the card completely, tripping up the current matching algorithm (I think). Maybe there is a better solution to achieve that, the idea with the unique id just seemed relatively straightforward to me.
 

Shun

状元
Yes, I think a web-based solution that allows you to sync flashcards between Pleco on the smartphone and Pleco on the web may be the most flexible and easy to use way to do this. That way, of course, you could edit a card directly on the PC without re-importing or assigning IDs.

Currently, I just prepare flashcards on the PC, load them onto Pleco, and do small edits inside Pleco. I think there will be another great feature: Picking which meanings and example sentences should appear on a card, choosing from all installed dictionaries. That should make putting together a personal flashcard quick and fun. Also, the context of where a word was looked up. I just hope these automatically generated flashcards will be editable like other cards, to add translations for other languages, for example.
 
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