Home

Awesome

<!-- TODO: Make Logo With Project Title underneath --> <p align="center"> <img width="300" align="center" src="./assets/logo.png"/> </p>

Anki Panky is a Pandoc Markdown to Anki hierarchical flashcard deck generator.

Basically, most stuff you can do in Pandoc translates into HTML into your cards!!!!! How good

Two-minute sales pitch

I really don't like to do any reasonable amount of typing-centric work outside of my Personal Development Environment. As such, I find the process of making decks in Anki's GUI to be an insanely hard task which I almost certainly never end up doing. There is just too much friction for me to want to invest the time to do so. I really love writing Markdown notes about anything that I'm learning. I feel productive as shit, I can use version control, and I can use any ecosystem I plugins my heart desires because at the end of the day, I'm just writing text in a code editor. But probably the most important thing is that I can use Pandoc to render my markdown to a lovely PDF, slide deck, or web-page using the same source file. Pandoc's markdown syntax makes writing detailed, technical markdown documents quite easy.

The desire to use Pandoc-style markdown to write my Anki decks is the titular reason for this bit of software. The second reason was that I couldn't find any other software which did exactly what I wanted. The compilation functionality I wanted for the MVP was the following:

Feature overview

Card syntax

If you have a short question for the front of your card, you can use an H1 to represent the front of your question card. Then the content which follows up until the next card (H1) represents the back of your card:

# What is the capital of France?

Paris

# What if I want to use maths in my flashcards

Just fucking do this:

\begin{equation*}
  x = \dfrac{-b \pm \sqrt{4ac}}{2a}
\end{equation*}

or this

$$
\begin{aligned}
&\int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2/2} \left( \frac{\partial H}{\partial t} +
\nabla \cdot (\mathbf{v} H) - K \Delta H \right) dx \\
&\qquad = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2/2} \left( -\frac{\partial V}{\partial
x} + \mathbf{v} \cdot \nabla H + H \nabla \cdot \mathbf{v} - K \Delta H \right)
dx \\
&\qquad = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty} e^{-x^2/2} \left( -\frac{\partial V}{\partial
x} + \frac{\partial}{\partial x} \left( H v_x \right) + \frac{\partial}{\partial
y} \left( H v_y \right) + \frac{\partial}{\partial z} \left( H v_z \right)
\right. \\
&\qquad = 0
\end{aligned}
$$

If you want a multi-line heading, then you should start the slide with a horizontal rule and then split the slide with the Pandoc slide pause syntax as follows:

---

This is now the front of the card.

. . .

This is now the back of the card.

Or an alternative syntax for multi-line front cards is to use an H1, The title of which gets put into the front of the card too.

# This is a title for the front of the card

The fact that there is a dotted split line below this means that this is an
extended card. Hence, this is still the front

. . .

This is now the back

Adding tags to cards

You can also assign tags to cards by using the AnkiTags HTML tag. The tags for the card is the list of space-separated tags which follow the tag. For example:

. . .

This is the back of my card

<AnkiTags this-is my tag list/>

Note that the tags must be at the end of the card as the last paragraph.

Images

You can use images as you would in a regular markdown document. The get mapped correctly in the .apkg file.

![This is the alt text](path/to/image.png)

Audio

You can embed audio the exact way you add an image to you markdown document. Just ensure the extension is .mp3. Again, the audio file does not need to be colocated with your markdown deck.

For some examples of how to use anything, you can check the test-dir file in the repo.

Naming your deck/subdecks

The default name for your collection/deck is the name of the input file/folder. If you want to specify the name of a markdown deck file, you can add the following metadata to the top of your file:

---
name: My Deck Name
---

If my file name was for example my-deck.md, then the name of the deck would be "{prefix}::My Deck Name".

You can name a folder of decks using a dotfile. If you want all decks in a folder to be prefixed by a certain name, you can add a .My Deck Name file to the (the name of the file can be anything). Hence, the name of your collection will be "{prefix}::My Deck Name::{subdeck-name}::...etc".

Note, you can have arbitrarily nested directories

Ignoring files in your collection folder (e.g. README.md)

anki-panky infers whether a file is markdown or not based on the first few bytes of the file. We aren't locked into using an .md extension. If you want to have a file in your directory structure but not in the compiled collection, you can use the .pankyignore special file.

This file takes the name of files to ignore (this works for directories too) and, if those files are present at the same directory level as the ignore file, they will be omitted. You can have as many ignore files as you want in your deck structure.

CLI arguments

To be added