Text2Anki

Video Demo: https://youtu.be/t6BR9YNSrkA

Description:

Automatically create effective Anki flash-cards from a varity of input files to kick-start your language studies!

Designed for effordless creation of hundreds of cards from docx, txt or csv files, containing just a list of phrases in your target language. Safe time by letting this program take care of adding translations and audio to your cards. All you need to do, is simply to upload the apkg output to Anki.

The auto-translation allows almost any language as input and output, making this script highly flexible. Audio is provided by using Anki's text-to-speech feature.

AwesomeTTS's Text-To-Speech feature requires Anki 2.1.(see Link below). AnkiWeb and AnkiDroid do not currently support this method. Also Text2Anki itself supports TTS only for English, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Chinese out-of-box. Fortunately, AwesomeTTS's Add-on allows to add TTS for most languages after importing a deck with Text2Anki!

Requirements:

• Python modules:
  • translators (installation: pip install translators)
  • genanki (installation: pip install genanki)
  • langdetect (installation: pip install langdetect)
• 3rd party applications: Anki (download: https://apps.ankiweb.net/) with Add-on AwesomeTTS installed
• Internet connection for translators API

Usage:

For docx files as input, the program will create a note from each single line, which will become the Front of the card. The auto-translation of the Front will constitute the Back of the card. Tags can be included at the end of each line by adding # tag1 tag2 ... (the # character is only required before the first tag, also no spaces are allowed within a tag).

For txt files as input, the program will create a note from each single line, which will become the Front of the card. The auto-translation of the Front will constitute the Back of the card. Similar to above, tags can be included at the end of each line by adding # tag1 tag2 ... (the # character is only required before the first tag, also no spaces are allowed within a tag).

For csv files as input, the first row of your table needs to be filled in with Front, Back and Tags, respectively, in columns A to C. When saving from an Excel workbook, use CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) .csv-format.

Under Front, fill in the list of words or phrases of the target language, which will be shown on the front of the card.

Back column: if left empty, the auto-translation will add a translation for each phrase. If instead you like to use your own translations, fill them in under Back, which will override the auto-translation.

Tags column: one or more tags can be entered here by adding tag1 tag2 ... (no spaces are allowed within a tag).

Steps:

1. It's recommended to define at least the desired deck name in config.py before creating a deck, e.g.: deck_name="Japanese Phrases". If left unchanged, the created deck will be named just output. Please check the explanations in config.py for further details.

2. Execute text2anki.py followed by the inputfile-name and optional deck-name:

   python text2anki.py inputfile-name [opt.: deck-name]

3. The final deck is then written to the specified output folder as deck_name.apk and can be simply uploaded to the anki application by double-clicking or using the import function of Anki. All imported decks will add new cards to the same deck in your Anki collection, unless the card already exits. If you want to create multiple decks, you need to change deck_name and deck_id before executing text2anki.py.

Program files:

text2anki.py

• Contains main program with logic and all subfunctions.
• Subfunctions:
  • validate(*ext): Takes a list of supported extensions-strings and returns True if user input is valid.
  • readout_XXX(file_name): Depending on the input file extention there is a corresponding readout function with the extension in place of XXX. It reads the content of the input file provided and returns a list of dicts with the keys Front, Back and Tags.
  • add_translations(list_of_dicts): Takes return value of the readout function and returns a list of dicts with missing translations added to field Back.
  • add_tag_propagation(list_of_dicts): Takes and returns a list of dicts which is modifyied by copying any tags in field Tags to subsequent list records.
  • create_anki_modelXXX(): defines the Anki deck model with a card layout based on the detected language and config.py audio settings. Each setting requires it's own version.
  • create_anki_deck(deck_name, list_of_dicts, anki_model): takes a deck name, a Anki deck model and a list of dicts to return an Anki deck.

config.py

• Contains all customizations to allow easy switch of configurations by just swapping this file (see Usage section)
• Is made up of a list of variables accompanied with explanatory comments.
• The main program loads all variables as global variables.