Card Generation

Reverse Cards

You can watch a video about reversing cards on YouTube.

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.

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.

When you edit a previously added note, Anki will automatically create extra cards if they were previously blank but no longer are. If your edits have made some cards blank when they previously were not, however, Anki will not delete them immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove the empty cards, go to Tools → Empty Cards in the main window. You will be shown a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.

Because of the way that card generation works, it is not possible to manually delete individual cards, as they would just end up being recreated the next time the note was edited. Instead, you should make the relevant conditional replacement fields empty and then use the Empty Cards option.

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

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.

Conditional Replacement

It is possible to include certain text, fields, or HTML 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}}

Or say you want to display a specific field in blue on the front of your card if there are extra notes on the back (perhaps the fact that there are notes serves as a reminder that you should spend more time thinking about the answer). You can style the field as follows:

{{#Notes}}
    <span style="color:blue;">
{{/Notes}}

{{FieldToFormat}}

{{#Notes}}
    </span>
{{/Notes}}

You can also use conditional replacement to control which cards are generated. This works since Anki will not generate cards which would have a blank front side. 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 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. Similarly, since this works by checking if the front field would be empty, it is important to make sure you wrap the 'entire' front side in the conditional replacement; for instance, the following would not work as expected:

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

Blank Back Sides

Card generation only looks at the front side of the card. For example, if you have a front template:

{{Field 1}}

and a back template:

{{Field 2}}

Then a card will be generated if Field 1 is non-empty. If Field 2 is empty, the card will still be generated, and you will get a blank back side.

If you wish to avoid a blank back side, you will need to place a required field on the front template as a conditional, like so:

{{#Field 2}}
    {{Field 1}}
{{/Field 2}}

This will ensure the card is generated only if both Field 2 and Field 1 are non-empty.

Adding Empty Notes

When you add a new note in Anki, if the card templates and note fields combine to produce no cards, a blank card will be created using the first template. This allows you to add material even if it's incomplete, and modify it or the template later to make it valid. If you don't wish to keep an empty note, you can remove it with the Empty Cards function.

Cloze Templates

Please see the cloze deletion section for background info.

The cloze note type functions differently from regular note types. Instead of a customizable number of card types, it has a single type 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.

Because card generation functions differently for cloze deletion cards, {{cloze:…​}} tags can not be used with a regular note type - they will only function properly when used with a cloze note type.

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}}