Reading, annotating and practising

A document’s page is made to be worked on as well as read. Linguistic annotations can be inspected and edited on the typeset sheet. Foreground colour is an authoring operation in Studio’s source editor.

1. Copying a word#

Click any word or phrase of the target language and it is copied to the clipboard, ready to paste into a dictionary: Copied: … says what. (A browser that refuses the clipboard says Clipboard unavailable.)

A footnote’s number opens its note in a small cloud when you point at it (a tap, on a phone); the notes are also listed at the end of the document.

2. Pronunciation and reading#

Point at a word of the target language and a small cloud opens over it:

• At its head, the word’s transliteration (or pronunciation, or pinyin, or rōmaji: each language names its own). Click it to edit it in place; a word that has none shows a +, which opens the same empty field. Enter saves, Escape cancels, a click elsewhere saves. Saving an empty field takes the transliteration away. For Japanese, the kana reading has a field of its own above it.

The cloud has no colour picker or swatches. Colours are applied in the source editor by selecting exactly the letters to colour. Existing colours remain visible while the cloud is open. A partially coloured word opens one cloud for the complete word, and copying it copies its complete plain text.

A lemma heading already carries its transliteration in the heading itself, so it does not open an empty cloud merely to offer no action. It can still be coloured by selecting its source text in Studio. The same linguistic cloud works in the editor’s preview.

Pictures, players and Latin blocks are laid out with the mouse too: a click on a picture or a Latin block, or on ⚙ layout at a player’s corner, opens its panel — see Pictures and recordings in a document.

3. ⇄ Glosses#

A gloss is a word of the target language followed by its translation in italics — کند = *slow* — anywhere in the document. ⇄ Glosses, under ☰ Contents, gathers every one of them into a window of their own, with nothing to keep in sync by hand. The button is greyed out when the document has none.

Table lists them in three columns — the word, its transliteration, its translation — and a fourth, the reading, for Japanese. The glosses come from the paragraphs, headings, bulleted lists, tables, boxes, Latin blocks and footnotes; a lemma heading’s own translation, written at its end (## کند | kond | … | = *slow*), is there too. A missing transliteration is taken from another mark or lemma heading of the same word.

The filter box

narrows the table to the rows where any column holds what you type.

A column’s header

sorts by it, a click at a time: A→Z, then Z→A, then back to the order the glosses appear in the text, which is where the table starts. The target column sorts as its own language does, and the transliteration ignores accents and case. A column nothing fills is not sortable, and says so.

Lemmas only

— when the document has lemma headings with translations — narrows the table and the flashcards to those: the document’s word list, without everything it glosses in passing.

A row in red is a gloss written without italics (کند = slow): only the one word after the = could be taken as its translation, and the ! beside it says so and how to write it.

Flashcards is the same glosses as a drill. A card shows a word of the target language; click it, or press Space, to see its reading, transliteration and translation (Show answer and Hide answer do the same), and Next → — or → or Enter — goes on. The cards are dealt from a shuffled deck, so every gloss comes once before any comes again; the counter says where you are, and the deck is shuffled anew at its end.

Escape, ✕ or a click beside the window closes it.

4. Exercises#

The document’s exercises are drawn unsolved, ready to be answered: the blocks shuffled, the choices mixed, the blanks empty. How each kind is written and answered is in the section of its own, Writing exercises.

Check exercises, at the end of the page, checks them all at once: each answer marked right or wrong, the explanations and the answer’s pictures and recordings shown, and the score beside the button — 7 / 9 correct. Change an answer and that exercise’s marks are cleared — its explanation, and the answer’s picture and recording, put away again — and the score disappears until you press Check exercises again. Flashcards are not scored.

In an exercise’s head, beside its kind:

⤢ Enlarge

is on every flashcard: the same card in a window over the page, laid out as it is on the page and magnified whole — every field in its place, a right-to-left paragraph on the right, pictures and players keeping their proportions — as large as the window holds. On a phone it is laid out a little narrower and magnified up to twice, a line whole on the page staying whole (only a paragraph that wraps there may wrap at other words). A click on the card, Space or Enter turns it, and the card on the page with it; the 🔊, a player or a link does its own thing; Escape or ✕ closes the window.

Hide transliterations

/ Show transliterations, on a card that has a transliteration: one switch for every flashcard, remembered in this browser. It is the same switch as Hide transliterations in the ⚙ panel’s Exercises group: turn one and the other follows.

✥ dragging on

/ ✥ dragging off, on an exercise whose blocks are put in order: whether the blocks can be dragged — Drag to answer in the ⚙ panel’s Exercises group, the same switch. It starts off on a touch screen, where the arrows on each block work better, and the choice is remembered in this browser for every page.

+ Deck

— below.

This guide’s pages draw exercises the way a document’s page does, so you can try all of it here: turn the card, open it with ⤢ Enlarge, hide its transliteration, answer the statements, and press Check exercises at the end of this page.

:::exercise flashcardcard-type: vocabtarget: رفتنtransliteration: raftanmeaning: to go::::::exercise true-falseprompt: True or false?- رفتن means to come. => false- آمدن means to come. => true:::

5. Into a deck: + Deck and + Add all exercises#

The Exercises door keeps exercises in decks and brings each one back when it is due, as Anki does (see the exercises section). From a document’s page, two buttons fill a deck.

+ Deck, in an exercise’s head, copies that exercise. The dialog — Copy this exercise into a deck — offers the decks of the document’s language, the one used last already chosen, and + New deck… at the end, which asks for Name of the new deck. Copy copies the exercise exactly as it is written, with the footnotes it calls, every picture and recording it names, and the document’s tags. The deck remembers where it came from; later edits to the document do not change the copy.

• An exercise the deck already has is added again only if you say so: This exercise is already in “…” — add it again?
• If the document was saved elsewhere since the page loaded, the copy is refused — This page is out of date — reload it, then copy — since the button could otherwise pick the wrong exercise.
• An exercise that shows errors has no + Deck; a deck would refuse it.

+ Add all exercises, in the top bar, copies many at once. Its dialog — Add all exercises to a deck — lists every exercise that has + Deck, in the page’s order, each ticked, with its number, its kind and its first words. Untick the ones to leave out (Select all and Select none help). Show gloss flashcards (N) adds the document’s glosses to the list, as vocabulary flashcards to tick too. Add again the ones this deck already has does what it says; otherwise those are left out. Choose the deck, and Add N exercises copies them one after another, Adding 3 of 12…. The message at the end says how many went in and what was left out; a page gone out of date stops the run, and a new deck that received nothing is taken away again.

The editor’s Exercises ▾ → Load from a deck… goes the other way: see Exercises in the editor.