I recently tried to play around with the Anki import function, and had a lot of the same issues. I tried importing about 500 cards from the AnKing Step1/Step2 deck (the deck itself is massive with +20,000 cards, and knowing that remnote cannot support that large of an import, I tried to import a relatively small portion of cards). It took an extremely long time, the desktop app crashed on me a few times until I decreased the number of cards I was trying to import (I originally tried to import about 2000 cards, and ended up only importing ~500)
There are a number of issues:
- The AnKing deck card template uses several fields, remnote converts these fields for each card into individual rems, even if the fields themselves are blank. there are pros and cons to this, but the formatting in remnote lends itself to look very unaesthetic. there are a lot of redundant spaces, for example.
- Just 5-10 Anki cards end up being formatted into 50-100 rems. This again makes things very clunky, resulting in very long load/processing times. also, this results in the creation of very large .json files. a .apkg of a 10 mbs ends up being converted to a .json of 100 mbs.
- despite using a local knowledge database using the desktop app to import the anki notes, most of the media did not import correctly into remnote. On the other hand, the AnKing logo, which is present on each card, was imported into remnote but in a very odd way, where the logo image repeats itself over and over again.
- since I imported several hundred Anki cards that are mapped to different anki subdecks, remnote created several new documents for each subdeck and listed them all under the Draft section on the sidebar. it would be preferable if during the import process remnote created a folder rem and then subsumed all these documents under one folder on the sidebar. when I tried to organize my sidebar and individually drag each document into a folder I created, the process was very lagging and frustrating, since some documents had resulted in 1000s of rems (if there were 50-70 anki cards in that subdeck) and remnote did not like me moving those documents around.
- here is an example of the Anki import result for one of the subdecks I imported to my local knowledge base, then exported to a .json, and then imported into my web-based knowledge base so I could publish/share it. notice all the broken images (this is more or less how it appears on the desktop remnote as well, except the AnKing logo image does appear in the local desktop remnote, but appears broken here): RemNote
ETA: after further investigation it is not that the images are broken, they actually aren’t being imported and all, and I suspect that’s because of the script in the AnKing card template that formats the fields into html links, and somehow that messes up the import of the images that are in those fields. I don’t know if that makes sense, but here is a copy and paste of a portion of the anki card template script:
<script>
// ############## HINT REVEAL SHORTCUTS ##############
// Visit https://keycode.info/ to get the number/letter for the key you want to assign.
// The shortcuts are Alt + the number/letter below
// All shortcuts will also open with "H" if using the Hint Hotkeys add-on
var lecturenotes = '49';
var missedQ = '50';
var pathoma = '51';
var bnb = '52';
var firstaid = '53';
var sketchy = '54';
var pixorize = '55';
var physeo = '56';
var additional = '57';
var OpenCloseAll = '222';
var ScrollToHint = true;
</script>
<div class="clozefield">{{cloze:Text}}</div>
<!-- ############## EDIT CLOZE DURING REVIEW ##############
-change below (not above) to "edit:cloze:Text" for editable field,
but be sure to have the correct add-on installed-->
<div class="editcloze">{{edit:cloze:Text}}</div>
<!-- ############## TEXT-TO-SPEECH ##############
replace the arrows/dashes from the statement below with double brackets-->
<!--tts en_US voices=Apple_Samantha speed=1.4:cloze-only:Text-->
<hr>
<!-- ############## SHOW HINTS AUTOMATICALLY ##############
For instructions on how to show a field automatically, visit www.ankingmed.com/faq and type "show hint" into the search bar -->
<!-- LECTURE NOTES FIELD -->
{{#Lecture Notes}}<a href="#" class="hint" id="hint-ln" onclick="this.style.display='none'; myFunction('button-ln', 'hint-ln', 'button-ln'); return false;">
<button class="button-ln"><img src="_Anking_v3.png"> Lecture Notes</button></a>{{/Lecture Notes}}
<div id="button-ln" class="generalclass" style="display:none;">
{{#Lecture Notes}}<button onclick="document.getElementById('hint-ln').style.display='inline-block'; myFunction('button-ln', 'hint-ln', 'button-ln')" class="button-ln" style="background:#ababab; color:black!important; font-weight:bold; width:50%!important;"><img src="_Anking_v3.png"> Lecture Notes</button>
<br>
<div class="hints" id="lecture">{{edit:Lecture Notes}}</div>
{{/Lecture Notes}}</div>
I think the AnKing card template may just be too complex for the remnote import function to handle, and it’s a pretty unique deck, so I can understand it not being a priority to figure out right this moment.
Although it is a very popular deck among medical students, if i recall correctly, version 9 had about 200k downloads prior to version 10 (the current version) being released. If RemNote had a “premade deck” similar to AnKing I believe we could get a lot more interest in remnote from med students.
