Cloze deletions

Highlight any text with ==double equals== to blank it out. Each highlight becomes one fill-in-the-blank card. Cloze is enabled by default.

## The Solar System

The ==Sun== is the star at the center of our solar system. The closest planet
to the Sun is ==Mercury==, and the largest planet is ==Jupiter==.

The example above produces three cards — one for each highlight.

The highlight syntax is ordinary Obsidian markdown, so a note full of cloze cards still reads as prose and still renders normally in reading view. Nothing about it is DecksMD-specific.

The first of those three cards reviews like this:

Front

The [...] is the star at the center of our solar system.

Back

The Sun is the star at the center of our solar system.

Whether the other two blanks stay hidden depends on the profile's cloze context mode.

During review

The active blank shows as [...]; tap or press Space to reveal it.
The rest of the sentence stays visible, which is the point — cloze tests recall in context, unlike a bare question.

Context modes

Each profile has a cloze context setting with two modes:

Hidden — the other highlights in the same sentence stay blanked while you answer the active one.
Open — the other highlights are shown, so only the active blank is hidden.

These drill different things. Open gives you maximum context and tests one fact at a time; it is the gentler setting and usually the right default. Hidden forces you to hold the whole structure in mind, which is what you want for a list that must be recited completely — the elements of a legal test, the steps of a pathway.

Writing good cloze cards

The common failure is blanking too much of one sentence. A sentence with six highlights produces six cards that each show almost nothing, and all six become leeches.

Prefer one or two blanks per sentence, and blank the thing you actually need to produce:

Negligence requires ==a duty of care==, breach, causation and remoteness.

is a better card than blanking all four elements at once — unless you specifically want to drill the complete list, in which case use Hidden context deliberately.

In tables

Cloze works inside table cells, so you can combine it with the tables format when the answer is a sentence with one key element rather than a single word.

With maths

Cloze works inside $…$ maths, which also means Anki cloze inside maths survives an import intact.

Image occlusion is cloze

Image occlusion is built on top of cloze — a mask over a diagram is the visual equivalent of a ==highlight==. That has one practical consequence: