FAQ & Troubleshooting

Errors & Warnings¶

This section documents frequent errors that may show up on the info circle at the top right.

(Error) AnkiConnect failed to issue request.¶

This is an indication that Anki-Connect is failing. There are two main reasons that Anki-Connect can fail:

Ensure that Anki-Connect is installed. If it is installed, be sure to restart Anki to ensure the add-on is actually running.
If you are using an older version of Anki (2.1.49 and below), see the note in the Anki-Connect setup section here.

(Warning) JPMNOpts was not defined in the options file. Was there an error?¶

If you see this as an isolated warning without any other errors, it is very likely that you are using Anki version 2.1.49 or below. Please check your Anki version to confirm this:

Main Window → Help → About...

If your Anki version is indeed 2.1.49 or below, then this should only appear on the front side of your first card of the session. To check, try flipping the card and back. This warning should dissappear once you do.

The only side effect of this is that the user-defined runtime options will not be used for the front side of the first card, and the defaults will be used instead.

There are two ways to fix this:

Update Anki to a higher version.
Compile the card with hard-coded defaults.

Why this happens (click here)

The <script ... src="_jpmn-options.js"> tag seems to runs asynchronously on 2.1.49 and below, meaning that the order of when this is ran is not constant compared to the main javascript block. With that being said, the exact tag seems to run synchronously on 2.1.50 and above, so it is guaranteed to run before the main javascript block on these versions.

With my current knowledge, the only way to guarantee the order of this import is asynchronous functions, or some other asynchronous features. For example, a simple await import(...) should work. However, asynchronous features have been avoided throughout the development of this, as it currently seems to behave unpredictably within Anki.

General Error Troubleshooting¶

If none of the above worked, the following will be some general troubleshooting tips that can help you figure out what the error is:

Try disabling all of your add-ons other than the mandatory ones listed in the setup page. Note that you have to restart Anki after disabling the add-ons for the changes to take effect.

If it works after this step, please let me know which add-on(s) conflicts with this note type! To do this, re-enable the add-ons one-by-one (remembering to restart Anki each time!).
With all of your non-mandatory add-ons disabled, try to upgrade Anki to the latest version, and see if the issue still persists. If this works but an add-on you consider mandatory no longer works, please let me know! (I won't be able to upgrade the add-on for you, but I can potentially point to alternatives and/or add it to the documentation somewhere so others are aware of the issue.)

If you can't manage to fix it, please reach out to me on Discord, or submit an issue!

Troubleshooting¶

The `SentenceReading` field is not updated / is different from the `Sentence` field¶

This happens because programs such as mpvacious and asbplayer update the sentence manually. For example, assume the subtitles are the following:

だって、麻衣さんは遅刻してきた男を、健気に一時間三十八分も
待っているような可愛げのある女じゃない！さては偽物だな！

If you make a card from the highlighted 偽物, the Sentence and SentenceReading field will only contain the text from the 2nd subtitle. If you then use mpvacious or asbplayer to grab both subtitles, the Sentence field will be updated, but the SentenceReading field will not be updated.

Partial solutions

Sometimes, the problem appears because one subtitle can span multiple lines. These partial solutions work to solve that problem. However, these do not work for when lines span multiple subtitles.

For mpvacious, use a texthooker that can remove all whitespace (i.e. Renji's Texthooker).
For asbplayer, you can remove the line breaks in the subtitle file itself (i.e. with SubtitleEdit)

The only full solution I know to this is to disabling automatic furigana generation on card add. If you still want furigana on your cards, bulk generate it after each session.

The word is incorrectly highlighted / not highlighted at all.¶

The word is usually highlighted by default, but the word may not be highlighted for the following reasons:

The sentence field got updated by an external program.
The card was imported from an older deck that did not highlight the tested word.

As of version 0.11.1.0, the card will automatically attempt to highlight the word if the word was not highlighted in the first place. However, this highlight may yield incorrect results. This is expected behavior, and you are expected to manually bold the sentence if the highlight is incorrect.

See here for more info.

The frequency list display looks squished.¶

This is because you are using Anki version 2.1.49 or below. There are two main ways of fixing this:

Update to a higher version of Anki (recommended).

If you do not wish to update Anki, add the following CSS:

.frequencies__group {
  margin-left: 20px;
}

.frequencies-overflow {
  margin-left: 10px;
}

The Show/Hide button doesn't do anything.¶

The show/hide button requires that the displayed sentence has a bolded element. For example, this means if the currently displayed sentence comes from the AltDisplay field and nothing in that field is bolded, then the show/hide button will do nothing.

This potentially relates to the issue above.

The replay audio button plays the sentence, word, and then sentence.¶

This is playing the audio from the front of the card, and then the back of the card, in sequence. To fix it so you only hear the audio displayed in the back of the card, go to:

Decks (main anki browser)
→ Deck settings (the gear beside your deck)
→ Options
→ Audio section
→ Toggle Skip question when replaying answer

The `Tools` → `Check Media` interface removes the font files.¶

This is a known bug, and unfortunately, this bug will not be fixed.

If you want to use this tool, temporarily move the fonts outside of the media folder. If you accidentally removed the fonts, redownload the fonts and re-add them into the media folder of your profile.

This will not be fixed because to make debugging easier for the developer. When a user is asked to export a card, the exported file will not contain the font files, meaning that the result .apkg file will be about 1MB instead of some 20MB, allowing it to be shared easily on a place like Discord.

This card template loads slower than other card templates.¶

Usually, this is not very noticeable on faster computers. However, the card may load slower compared to others if you are on a slow computer.

Note for Android (Ankidroid)

Unfortunately, it seems like Ankidroid has a specific issue where fonts are loaded extremely slowly. This appears to be a problem with the chrome webview itself (see: Ankidroid issue, Chromium issue). This means outside of removing the custom fonts, there is no feasible way to considerably speed up Ankidroid.

From person experiments, simply removing the fonts without changing anything else on jp-mining-note results in almost instanteous load times. This is in comparison to the same template with custom fonts included, which results in near one second load times.

There are some ways to remedying this. Both will inevitably remove certain features of the note.

(1) Prevent document reflow

By default, the mobile interface will not have any document reflow, so nothing has to be done for mobile.

However, on PC, the default settings forces document reflow every time the back-side of the card is loaded. On faster computers, this effect is virtually neglible. However, this effect is more noticeable on lower end computers.

To prevent document reflow, you must change the following two runtime options:

{
  "modules": {
    "img-utils": {
      "resize-height-mode": "fixed", // (1)!
      "primary-definition-picture": {
        "use-lenience": false, // (2)!
      }
    }
  }
}

Set this to anything OTHER THAN "auto-height". This may affect the display image size in an undesireably way, because the height of the display image will no longer be automatically adjusted.
Set this to false.

(2) Using compile-time options

Outside of document reflow, it appears that most of the lag doesn't come from the javascript execution, but rather the fact that the note has a lot of HTML (Anki's internal html and template parser) and javascript text (javascript compilation time). Surprisingly, the time it takes for javascript to actually run is comparatively fast if the forced document reflow (see above) is remedied.

Both the amount of HTML and javascript can be reduced at the cost of removing functionality using the following compile-time options:

"hardcoded-runtime-options": True, // (1)!

"always-filled-fields": [], // (2)!
"never-filled-fields": [],

"enabled-modules": [ ... ], // (3)!

This removes extra javascript. To customize the runtime-options, you will need to specify your options in a different file (TODO).
Fill these two fields accordingly, depending on whether you use the fields or not.
Remove any modules you do not need. This is the biggest change you can do to increase the note's performance.

An example for a very optimized vocab card is shown here. Note that img-utils-minimal will still cause a document reflow unless you change the above options.

The sentence quotes are on completely different lines!¶

If your card looks like this:

then your Sentence field is likely formatted internally similar to the following example:

<div>そうデスサーヴァントの凸守を<b>差し置いて</b></div>
<div>マスターと行動を共にするとは万死に値するデース</div>

To fix this, edit the Sentence field html to remove the <div> tags, and add <br> tags wherever a line break should appear. For example, the above should be changed into:

そうデスサーヴァントの凸守を<b>差し置いて</b><br>
マスターと行動を共にするとは万死に値するデース

Why this can happen (click here)

This happens if you copy/paste directly from certain pages into the sentence field, such as some texthooker pages. This can also happen if you copy/paste from a texthooker page to a different field, say AdditionalNotes, and then copy a section of AdditionalNotes to Sentence.

The updating sentence with clipboard hotkey shouldn't have this problem, as <div> tags are not present by default.

Card Editing¶

How do I set the default card type?¶

In Yomichan's Anki Card Format, you can simply fill the field.

For example, if you want to set the default card type to be a sentence card, fill the IsSentenceCard field there.

How do I automatically change the value of a binary field on multiple existing cards?¶

You have three main options:

Warning

As always, before mass editing your collection, please backup your Anki data.

Batch Editing Addon

Python script:

# assuming you are at the root of the repo,
# i.e. after the `git clone ...` and `cd jp-mining-note`
cd ./tools

# sets all `IsSentenceCard` fields to be filled
python3 batch.py --fill-field "IsSentenceCard"

# empties all `IsSentenceCard` fields
python3 batch.py --empty-field "IsSentenceCard"

Regex Search (TODO)

How do I disable furigana on card generation?¶

In Yomichan's Anki Card Format, ensure that the SentenceReading field is empty.
If you are using the AJT Furigana addon, navigate to:

AJT → Japanese Options → Furigana → Select profile: Add furigana for sentence → Triggered by → Uncheck Note Added.

You likely want to bulk-generate the furigana if you are disabling furigana on card generation. See the question below to do just that.

How do I bulk generate furigana and pitch accents?¶

Head to the Card Browser window:

Main Window → Browse
Select all notes without furigana, with the following search:
```
"note:JP Mining Note" SentenceReading:
```
Head over to:

Edit (top left corner) → AJT: Bulk-generate.

Note

Bulk generating pitch accents will only batch generate the AJTWordPitch field. Pitch accent graphs and positions cannot be automatically generated. This is important to note if you are using colored pitch accent. If PAPositions is not filled, then the card cannot be automatically colored.

In version 0.12.0.0, this no longer matters, because the pitch accent info is properly parsed from AJTWordPitch.

Note

There may be some cards that still have an empty AJTWordPitch field. This is simply because the add-on did not contain the pitch data for those words.

How do I remove an empty card without deleting the entire note?¶

Quote

To remove the empty cards, go to Tools → Empty Cards in the main window. You will be shown a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.

^{Taken directly from Anki's official documentation.}

How do I edit the field's raw HTML?¶

Within the card browser, select a field to edit, and then type ctrl+shift+x.

Alternatively, on newer versions of Anki, you can click on the top-right corner on the code button.

How do I use this note type as an Anime Card?¶

An anime card is a vocab card with a picture and (native) sentence audio, which is the default setup for this card.

If you want to add hints that aren't collapsed by default, use the HintNotHidden field.

Other Questions¶

Where is the (X) folder in Anki?¶

You must first locate the Anki2 folder. The location of this folder is different for each operating system.

Quote

WindowsMacLinux

On Windows, the latest Anki versions store your Anki files in your appdata folder. You can access it by opening the file manager, and typing %APPDATA%\Anki2 in the location field. Older versions of Anki stored your Anki files in a folder called Anki in your Documents folder.

On Mac computers, recent Anki versions store all their files in the ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2 folder. The Library folder is hidden by default, but can be revealed in Finder by holding down the option key while clicking on the Go menu. If you're on an older Anki version, your Anki files will be in your Documents/Anki folder.

On Linux, recent Anki versions store your data in ~/.local/share/Anki2, or $XDG_DATA_HOME/Anki2 if you have set a custom data path. Older versions of Anki stored your files in ~/Documents/Anki or ~/Anki.

^{Taken directly from Anki's official documentation.}

Your profile folder is under Anki2/PROFILE_NAME.
Your media folder is under Anki2/PROFILE_NAME/collections.media.
Your addons folder is under Anki2/addons21.

How do I backup my Anki data?¶

The following makes a complete backup of your collection, including media:

Main Window → File (top left corner) → Export... → Anki Collection Package

The following makes a temporary backup of your collection, not including media:

Main Window → File (top left corner) → Create Backup

See Anki's official documentation for more info.

How do I backup Yomichan settings?¶

Navigate to Yomichan Settings.
Go to the Backup section
Select Export Settings

How do I export notes?¶

Navigate to the Card Browser, by doing the following:

Main Window → Browse
Select a note. Hold down ctrl to select multiple individual notes.
Right click the selected notes, and navigate to:

Notes → Export Notes...

How do I see the version of jp-mining-note?¶

Preview any card. The version should be displayed at the top left corner.

For mobile, the version be shown at the top right corner. Note that this is only displayed on mobile for versions 0.11.1.0 and above.

How do I see the version of Anki?¶

Navigate to:

Help → About

What card type should I use?¶

The short answer is: whichever one you want. :)

The long answer is: whichever one you want, because everyone has their own preferences on what card types they like. I recommend being open about it and experiment with them, to see which one you like.

What is the point of the `PASilence` field?¶

This is a hack to not play the sentence audio on the front side, even if you set-up your Anki client to do so. With this field filled correctly, the play sentence audio button will appear at the front, and will not be autoplayed.

Leaving this field empty will affect cards where you test pitch accent, i.e. with PAShowInfo filled. In particular, this will cause Anki to autoplay the sentence audio on the front side of cards that test pitch accent, which is undesirable.

Do you plan on supporting any other language other than Japanese?¶

Unfortunately, other languages outside of Japanese will not be supported.

The reason for this decision is best explained in the "When are you going to add support for $MYLANGUAGE?" question within Yomichan's README:

Quote

Developing Yomichan requires a decent understanding of Japanese sentence structure and grammar, and other languages are likely to have their own unique set of rules for syntax, grammar, inflection, and so on. Supporting additional languages would not only require many additional changes to the codebase, it would also incur significant maintenance overhead and knowledge demands for the developers. Therefore, suggestions and contributions for supporting new languages will be declined, allowing Yomichan's focus to remain Japanese-centric.

Discord Contact Info¶

Username: aquafina_water_bottle (user id: 244677612272746496)

Servers:

TheMoeWay (I recommend using the jp-mining-note thread in the #resources-sharing channel)
Refold (JP) server (I recommend using the jp-mining-note thread in the #sentence-mining-workflows channel)

Last update: June 9, 2023

FAQ & Troubleshooting

Errors & Warnings¶

(Error) AnkiConnect failed to issue request.¶

(Warning) JPMNOpts was not defined in the options file. Was there an error?¶

General Error Troubleshooting¶

Troubleshooting¶

The SentenceReading field is not updated / is different from the Sentence field¶

The word is incorrectly highlighted / not highlighted at all.¶

The frequency list display looks squished.¶

The Show/Hide button doesn't do anything.¶

The replay audio button plays the sentence, word, and then sentence.¶

The Tools → Check Media interface removes the font files.¶

This card template loads slower than other card templates.¶

The sentence quotes are on completely different lines!¶

Card Editing¶

How do I set the default card type?¶

How do I automatically change the value of a binary field on multiple existing cards?¶

How do I disable furigana on card generation?¶

How do I bulk generate furigana and pitch accents?¶

How do I remove an empty card without deleting the entire note?¶

How do I edit the field's raw HTML?¶

How do I use this note type as an Anime Card?¶

Other Questions¶

Where is the (X) folder in Anki?¶

How do I backup my Anki data?¶

How do I backup Yomichan settings?¶

How do I export notes?¶

How do I see the version of jp-mining-note?¶

How do I see the version of Anki?¶

What card type should I use?¶

What is the point of the PASilence field?¶

Do you plan on supporting any other language other than Japanese?¶

Discord Contact Info¶

The `SentenceReading` field is not updated / is different from the `Sentence` field¶

The `Tools` → `Check Media` interface removes the font files.¶

What is the point of the `PASilence` field?¶