Anki now supports changing of text color

January 22, 2008 by Josh | 4 comments

I forgot to write a quick post on this at the time of it happening, so here’s that post a bit late:

Damien, the maker of Anki, has put out a number of updates over the past weeks. I wrote back in November of ‘07 that I had abandoned SuperMemo for Anki, due to its simplicity and cleanness of design (unlike the monumentally cluttered SuperMemo).

One of the updates that Damien released fairly recently added something that I was actually missing from SuperMemo: the ability to change the color of text in the cards. You could do this before for a whole side of a card, like making an entire sentence green or blue, but you couldn’t select individual words or other parts of the card and change their color. I prefer to emphasize what I’m learning in a sentence with a color rather than with bold or underlining; no real reason, just a preference I have.

Now I can do that. :)

If you’ve not checked out Anki yet, do so – it’s a great app. And, if you end up liking it, consider donating to the developer – he’s put a lot of time into the app, as well as helping users in the support forum. If you want to donate, there are PayPal buttons on the main Anki page as well as the download page.

  1. Sakaya’s avatar

    Sakaya on January 23, 2008 at 12:17 pm

    I just wish they would let you go from Japanese to English only. I stopped using Anki because of this.

  2. Josh’s avatar

    Josh on January 23, 2008 at 12:27 pm

    Hi Sakaya,

    You ca do this. I’d guess what you’re doing is, when making cards, you have “Front to back” as well as “Back to front” selected. This will make it to where 2 cards will be made, Japanese to English and English to Japanese. You can uncheck “Back to front” and produce one card for each translation.

    You can uncheck the “Back to front” option in the actual card editor (when you’re adding cards); the button you need to click is in the top right of the window.

  3. olivz’s avatar

    olivz on January 28, 2008 at 3:26 pm

    You know, when I first read this post several days ago, my first thought was “What’s the big deal?”

    I can see your point now though since I just had to use this feature last night when I used sentences as inputs. The colors just pop more than bold/italics/underline.

  4. Josh’s avatar

    Josh on January 30, 2008 at 6:36 pm

    olivz: Yeah, they do indeed pop out more. I also like it because when I’m entering Russian stuff, I mark the accents in words with bold. I could use underlining, but I just overall prefer to use colors.