There's an idea I have since some time ago, for a tool that automatizes the creation of Anki cards from any selectable text.

This hypothetical tool would work like this:

1.- You enter different deck templates.

2.- Select one to make it active and start the card creation mode. The program will show you a frame with blank spaces for each field, and will highlight the first field.

3.-
A.- Select text.
or
B.- Click the field and write its content by yourself.

4.- Press a hotkey (or it could be as simple as clicking right click) and the selected text will be copied into the active field, and the next field will become active.

5.- Repeat 3 and 4 until you fill all the fields.

6.- (Optional) Edit "manually" fields you need to modify.


When you press the hotkey after selecting the text for the last field, the program will save the fact and empty the field spaces so you can create the next card.

This kind of tool would be useful for fast creation of Anki cards from whatever you are reading on the computer. It could be used for example for creating vocabulary or sentence cards from software dictionaries or for incremental reading.

What do you think. Would you find this kind of tool useful?

I guess it shouldn't be too hard to create for someone with knowledge about programming.

This is pretty similar to what Learning With Texts does. I definitely find it to be a useful too, but you may want to look into that so that you're not reinventing the wheel.

Fillanzea Wrote:This is pretty similar to what Learning With Texts does. I definitely find it to be a useful too, but you may want to look into that so that you're not reinventing the wheel.

If you mean this :http://lwt.sourceforge.net/, then I mean something totally different. My idea is a much more general tool, that eventually could be used for making translation pairs, but its use would be much wider. You could use it to create Anki cards from Wikipedia articles, your favorite blogs, news sites, open courseware materials, or from notes you took from your own classes, if you type them.

Do you mean something like this:

http://www.banaban.net

Quote:Scenario 1 : In the source document, select, eg. via mouse, the text you wish to use as a question, and press CTRL+C. Then select the answer, press CTRL+C again. Same goes for next question pairs. Did you notice, you don't need to switch between the source document and your text editor, you didn't need to paste the copied parts of text. Knowledge Harvester does that all in the background, saving your time and fingers. It automatically creates the Q&A text file, that you can later easily convert to Palm db with the smconv.exe utility, supplied with your copy of SuperMemo.

Scenario 2 : Or, maybe you are reading a text in foreign language. Select the "Questions only" mode from Knowledge Harvester, and then proceed with selecting and copying any word you do not know and would like to learn. All words will appear as a question in Knowledge Harvester - so that you can later lookup the definitions in the dictionary and fill them into preprocessed Q&A text as answers. "Answers only" mode works identically.