Flashcards for Anki, Quizlet and print

From a list to a deck, without copying anything out

The list is usually there already: in your notes, in an Excel column, or written by a chat you asked for thirty questions on the chapter. Only the boring part is missing, copying it into Anki or Quizlet one card at a time, or by hand onto index cards. Here you paste the list only once and out come the file to import into Anki, the text for Quizlet and the sheets to print double-sided.

It works with one card per line and a separator (tab, dash, semicolon or colon), but also with alternating question and answer lines, with groups separated by a blank line, with two columns copied from a spreadsheet (even with a line break inside a cell) and with the two shapes chats use: «Question:» and «Answer:» lines, and the Markdown table. The page says how it read the text; the lines it cannot read are listed with their number and the reason, instead of vanishing.

How it chooses the separator, and when to change it

The tab always wins if it is in more than half of the lines, because it arrives when you copy two columns from a spreadsheet. Otherwise dash, semicolon and colon compete, but only those found in more than half of the lines, and the winner is the one that comes first in the line most often: answers carry other signs along, like a list «red; yellow; blue» or the dates «1789 - 1799», and questions usually do not. If the separator changes from one line to the next, each line is cut at the first one it has.

The cut is at the first separator of the line, and the rest is the answer as it is. A colon between two digits does not count, so «Lunch: 12:30» becomes «Lunch» and «12:30»; the dash counts only with a space before and one after, so «e-mail» and «2-1» stay whole. If the separator is already inside the questions, as in «Ch. 3: the cell - …», pick another one from the menu. A header on the first line («Question» and «Answer», or «English» and «Italian», also in Italian or Spanish) is recognised and does not become a card.

If at least half of the lines have no separator at all, the lines are read in pairs, or in groups if blank lines split them.

The Anki file, and the three things nearly everyone gets wrong

The file has a tab between question and answer and, at the top, the headers that Anki reads by itself since version 2.1.54: separator, HTML, deck and note type. In Anki for desktop you open it from the File, Import menu, and the window comes up already filled in. It is tested with the real Anki 26.9 engine, which imports it without losing a character.

First: a line starting with the hash sign is, for Anki, a comment, and it vanishes without any warning. «#hashtag on social media» or «# of protons in carbon» would never reach the deck. Here those fields go between quotation marks, and the card stays.

Second: quotation marks, tabs and line breaks inside an answer. The field goes between quotation marks, with the ones inside doubled, as the Anki manual says; otherwise a tab splits the answer and the second half is lost. With HTML on, the line break becomes a <br>.

Third: the note type is named in the language of your Anki. In English it is called «Basic», or «Basic (and reversed card)» if you also want the reversed card, and that is the name this page writes. In an Anki set to another language that name does not exist: Anki ignores the line and uses its default type, and you pick the reversed cards yourself in the import window.

The deck, if it does not exist, is created, and «History::Rome» makes the Rome subdeck inside History. Tags are separated by a space or by a comma.

For Quizlet

The Quizlet import box expects by default a tab between term and definition and a new line between one card and the next, and that is the shape of this text. Quizlet however does not know quotation marks: an answer on several lines reaches it on a single line, and the page says on how many cards it did so. The text has not been tried inside Quizlet, because importing needs an account: what is tested is that it has that shape, character by character.

Printing front and back, with the answer behind the question

If you print the answers in the same order as the questions, when you flip the sheet the left column ends up on the right, and the answer of card 1 lands behind card 2. Here the back is mirrored: with eight cards per sheet the first row is 1 and 2 on the front, 2 and 1 on the back. The diagram above the button shows it, and every card carries its number on both sides.

In the print window choose double-sided, flip on long edge, scale at 100% and no headers. If the printer flips on the short edge, change the option here: then the rows are swapped instead of the columns. If it cannot print double-sided by itself, print the odd pages, put the stack back in the tray and print the even ones, after a test with one sheet marked in pencil.

On A4, with 8 cards per sheet each card is 9.5 × 6.9 cm, with 10 it is 9.5 × 5.5, with 12 it is 6.3 × 6.9 and with 18 it is 6.3 × 4.6. The type adapts to every card down to 8 points; if a text does not fit even like that, the page tells you which card it is before printing, even with Ctrl+P, which here prints the cards and not the page. The back can shift by a millimetre or two: that is why the text sits in the centre and the lines to cut along are on the front only.

What it does not do

It is not a revision program. It does not quiz you and does not remember what you know: Anki and Quizlet do that well, syncing your progress between phone and computer. It does not create an .apkg package and does not add images or audio: the text file is the route the Anki manual documents. And if a chat wrote the questions, reread the answers before printing: a wrong answer learnt by heart is worse than one you do not know.

For the times tables there is already Times Tables Quiz, and for other study sheets there are Make a word search and Concept map from an outline.