How to Customize the Jlab Cards

Summary: You can change the appearance and content of all cards at once by editing the card template. For example, you can move the image to the back or hide the roumaji (latin characters).

Everything you see on an Anki card comes from a note, which is a container that holds different fields of information. Anki uses those fields in a card template to create a card from a note. You can think of a template as something like a blueprint for building a card. Each card type has a front and a back template, and when you edit these templates, it updates all the corresponding cards at once.

Available Card Content

The note has multiple fields and you can freely arrange them on the cards. There is for example a field called “image” that by default is on the card front. In the following, we will move it to the back.

  1. Audio: Audio of the card
  2. Image: Image on the card
  3. RemarksBack: Contains most explanations on the back, including the translation and the word. In retrospect, I should have splitted this into multiple, atomic fields – bad design decision. Sorry!
  4. Jlab-Kanji: Original subs from the anime without spaces or furigana
  5. Jlab-KanjiSpaced: Like Jlab-Kanji, but with spaces between the word borders (computed by one of my tools, not always accurate)
  6. Jlab-Hiragana: Hiragana transcription with spaces between words
  7. Jlab-KanjiCloze: Like Jlab-Kanji, but updated by the jlab addon. It stores the cloze hints after a word was looked up
  8. Jlab-Lemma: Dictionary forms of the words
  9. Jlab-HiraganaCloze: Like Jlab-KanjiCloze, but in Hiragana, also updated by the jlab addon
  10. Other-Front: Used for Kanji with Furigana, updated by the jlab addon
  11. References: Links to additional resources
  12. Version: Current version of the deck
  13. RemarksFront: Hints on the front (rarely used)
  14. Sequence: Determines the card order, do not touch this
  15. Source: Which anime is the card taken from
  16. QuestionLink: Link to the contact form of my website to leave card-specific feedback
  17. Jlab-DictionaryLookup: Contains words that were looked up with the jlab addon for this card, irrelevant
  18. Jlab-Metadata: Not used
  19. Jlab-Remarks: Not used
  20. Jlab-Translation: Not used

The following fields are updated & overwritten by the jlab addon, do not touch them:

  1. Jlab-ListeningFront: Content for the listening card front, updated according to reading assistance
  2. Jlab-ListeningBack: Content for the listening card back, updated according to reading assistance
  3. Jlab-ClozeFront: Content for the cloze card front, updated according to reading assistance
  4. Jlab-ClozeBack: Content for the cloze card back, updated according to reading assistance, including the cloze hints in green

Editing the template

On the card template, a field is used by enclosing it in double curly braces, e.g. {{Image}}. This will add the content of this field to the card. Moving the image from the front to the back is illustrated in the following images for desktop Anki. Note that after adding the image to the back, you can move it around by editing the template text. It is a bit awkward to do, but works well after a few tries. Don’t give up ;).

HTML

Customizing cards beyond shifting fields is beyond this short guide. Just to mention this, the cards in Anki are displayed in something like a web browser and you can use full-featured html and css. Details on this are found here.