Pleco Flashcards to Anki Flashcards

[Ruben von Zwack]

I use different colours in Anki, but the only way I know how to do this is to define colour per field. Now theoretically you could create four or five "fields" instead of one. But it goes without saying that this works only in theory, because as we all know, vocabulary is multisyllabic, and you couldn't even begin to prepare as many fields as there are possible tone- and syllable-combinations.

[LinZhenPu]

Is it possible to import Anki flashcards into Pleco?

Aside, if I buy an add on in the iOS version of Pleco, can I activate it in the Android version of Pleco and vice versa? How about in China?

[mikelove]

Can't import Anki flashcards into Pleco directly -  you'd have to export them to a text file first and reformat them to:

 

characters<tab>pinyin<tab>definition

 

one entry per line. (e.g. by opening it in Excel and shifting around the columns until they looked like taht)

 

We're working on a native Anki deck format importer too, but it'll require our big 4.0 flashcard update since there are some things about Anki cards right now that we don't support but will support in that update. (we may support a more minimal / limited import sooner than that on Android via our recently added AnkiDroid integration - currently only used for creating cards in Anki but the same APIs would also let us go the other way)

 

You can activate iOS add-ons on Android - pleco.com/androidxfer.html - but generally can't go the other way on that since Apple's policies forbid us from selling 'features' outside of their store; if you buy a dictionary add-on on Android we usually can move that over, though, under the same exception that applies to Kindle e-books and such. China should be no problem, we distribute our Android app through our website as well as Google Play and use a non-Google system for activation too.

[艾墨本]

On 11/23/2016 at 10:13 PM, mikelove said:

We're working on a native Anki deck format importer too, but it'll require our big 4.0 flashcard update since there are some things about Anki cards right now that we don't support but will support in that update. (we may support a more minimal / limited import sooner than that on Android via our recently added AnkiDroid integration - currently only used for creating cards in Anki but the same APIs would also let us go the other way)

 

Will the 4.0 update make it easier to export specific aspects of a notecard and certain entires. As it stands, if I have several different dictionaries in use in one deck, the export is a mess. The way things are divided (tabs vs spaces vs etc) and what information it comes with. I have to spend significant time messing with the format before importing it into Anki. 

 

Another challenge: The dictionary entry might have an example sentence attached. In Pleco this is minimizable so I only see the definition but when I export it, the example is still there. On the other hand, I have not figured out how to get example sentences to export with my cards intentionally.

 

For the export function to be more useful to me, I really need the formatting and to be consistent, especially the order that everything comes out. If a dictionary entry lacks a certain field, a place holder would help so that Anki doesn't put the following field in the earlier field.

 

[mikelove]

It'll all be HTML, actually - we've finally gotten rid of our proprietary text formatting system (dating back to the pre-iPhone era, when 'just use HTML' was a bad idea performance-wise) and now we're doing everything in HTML. A limited subset of it, technically - we're still using our own text fields for the most part, we're just styling text in them with HTML.

 

We plan to keep purely semantic tags intact along with formatting ones - no reason not to since they won't impact rendering anyway - so you should be able to extract examples and such with that.

[艾墨本]

@mikelove Well now I have just one more reason to anxiously await the release of 4.0.