Flashcards: Mark headword in Outgoing links field

[Shun]

It's great how the context of a word is added with every flashcard, even when adding from a PDF document.



Could one also highlight in a different color—or underline—the flashcard's headword in the context sentence? That would be useful especially with longer sentences. Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Those should show up - with highlighting - in the definition screen under Examples. (in general I'd rather not have people going to the Info tab to get this information since it's really more about editing / managing cards than finding information)

 

[Shun]

I understand. Following your advice, I added 机器 as a test from the Reader, but the 机器 was unhighlighted also in the dictionary definition:



(See the third line) Do you have any idea what could be wrong? Thanks.

 

[mikelove]

Ah, they're normally shown with bold text but you're using our Kai font which doesn't have a bold version. We should probably use an alternate highlight in those cases. If you temporarily switch your Chinese font to PingFang you should then see the word in bold.

 

[Shun]

Thanks! I think underlining is the way to go.

 

[Shun]

Hello Mike,

adding a new flashcard from a text file in the .25 build, I can't find the automatically saved context anymore—neither at the bottom of Card Info nor in the dictionary's Example tab. Could some setting have disabled it?

Writing this post, a new idea occurred to me: If a flashcard with context information already exists and the flashcard is added to an additional category with the "+" button, could one configure it such that the new context is added to the previously saved context info instead of replacing it? In that way, one could collect more and more good example usages for a particular word. Or is that perhaps already how it's designed to work?

Thanks,

Shun

 

[mikelove]

adding a new flashcard from a text file in the .25 build, I can't find the automatically saved context anymore—neither at the bottom of Card Info nor in the dictionary's Example tab. Could some setting have disabled it?

Not aware of any recent changes that would affect this but will double check.

Writing this post, a new idea occurred to me: If a flashcard with context information already exists and the flashcard is added to an additional category with the "+" button, could one configure it such that the new context is added to the previously saved context info instead of replacing it? In that way, one could collect more and more good example usages for a particular word. Or is that perhaps already how it's designed to work?

If you set 'sentence cards' to 'button' instead of 'automatic' in the reader settings, there'll be a separate button you can tap on to add a new context sentence to flashcards, and adding it will also add it to the current flashcard. (it will appear with dots around it if the current card isn't yet linked to that context sentence - you can tap on it in that case to add it to that card too)

 

[Shun]

Not aware of any recent changes that would affect this but will double check.

Thanks! I now see what was wrong: I had "Sentence cards" set to "none" for some reason.

If you set 'sentence cards' to 'button' instead of 'automatic' in the reader settings, there'll be a separate button you can tap on to add a new context sentence to flashcards, and adding it will also add it to the current flashcard. (it will appear with dots around it if the current card isn't yet linked to that context sentence - you can tap on it in that case to add it to that card too)

I'm delighted to hear that. It's perhaps best to use the "button" mode, which forces one to add everything manually.

 

[mikelove]

If it's set to 'none' then 'automatic' might also work - I had forgotten that we designed it so that in 'automatic' it would show the + button with a dotted line around it if the card exists but isn't linked to the current sentence context.

 

[Shun]

Oh, you're right, that works great. That is the ideal solution for me. It seems to work complementarily with the "card exists in another category" dotted-line indicator, which is very neat.

 

[Shun]

Hi,

In EPUB or TXT files where there is linear text, the sentence in which a word appears is saved with its flashcard. In a OCR'ed document, it's less predictable, like in this example:



What is saved:




For OCR, could one perhaps make it so the previous and following two lines are added as context to a flashcard? Generally, could one make the amount of context saved with a flashcard configurable? Apologies if that's already possible with an Expert option. Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

Actually I'm sorry to say that the intent was that OCR would not support sentence contexts at all, because even when it works correctly you've got to deal with situations like a sentence spanning pages and there's not really a reliable way for us to get OCR text from the previous / next page of a document if you haven't checked it yet.

It seems like in this case it's simply failing to extend to the previous line - if we do eventually support this officially we can make sure that's addressed, thanks.

 

[Shun]

I see, that's no biggie! But for linear EPUB, TXT, or DOCX files, do you think one could perhaps add an additional sentence before and after as an off-by-default option? Many thanks!

 

[mikelove]

I think we'd have to store it in a different place - the idea with the sentence contexts is that at the same time you're also creating a card for the sentence, which you can then use for cloze testing or whatever else you like. But a multiple-sentence context isn't really as useful as a discrete flashcard, so we'd need to work up another mechanism for storing / linking to those.

So it's a possibility for a future update, but it's dicey enough that I don't think we could come up with a way to do it that we were happy with for 4.0.

 

[Shun]

Thanks, I understand. Perhaps it could someday simply be added as a longer text field that isn't linked to any additional functionality, while keeping the current structure with single sentences intact.