Flashcards
A Mantis flashcard is a card drawn in the map, floating a short distance from a point and connected to it by a line. It shows that point’s preview image, title, and summary. The Flashcards panel is the board that controls those cards: how many there are, which points they come from, how big they are, and where they sit.
Note
These cards have no question side and no answer side. If you want generated question-and-answer cards or a multiple-choice quiz over your selection, that lives in Summarizer > Education.
Where to find it
View > Inspection > Flashcards. The panel waits for point metadata and shows a spinner until it arrives.
What the panel shows
The header shows a card count, then a chevron that collapses and expands the controls. The count follows your selection: with points selected it is the number of selected points, otherwise it is the Card Count value below.
Where the cards come from
With nothing selected, Mantis picks the cards for you. It takes the clusters at the depth set by Cluster Level, sorts them by size, keeps the largest ones up to Card Count, and puts one card on the point closest to each of those clusters’ centers. Regenerate Cards runs that pass again, and changing Cluster Level clears the existing cards and rebuilds them from scratch.
Cards are also added one at a time from elsewhere: by the Composer when it cites a point, and by clicking a point on the map if you turned on the Show Flashcard selection action (Map Settings > Selection Actions, off by default). Both of those paths stop at 20 cards.
Controls
Every control writes straight to the map, with no apply step.
- Box Size, 18 to 72. The card’s width is four times this value in pixels, and the padding scales with it. Height follows the content.
- Font Size, five presets from -2 to +2, labelled Default at 0. They scale the card’s text by 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.5x, and 2x.
- Card Count. The slider covers 0 to 20; the number box next to it accepts up to 999. At 0, no cards are drawn at all.
- Arm Length, 0 to 5 in steps of 0.25. How far the card sits from its point.
- Vertical Height, 0.1 to 3.0. How high the card floats above the plane. This slider only appears in 2.5D view mode.
- Spread Angle, 0 to 90 in steps of 5. How widely the cards fan out around their anchors.
- Cluster Level, -2 to +2, labelled Very Broad, Broad, Default, Detailed, Very Detailed. Which depth of the cluster tree the automatic cards are drawn from. Negative goes up the hierarchy to fewer, larger clusters; positive goes down to more, smaller ones.
- Regenerate Cards. Rebuilds the card set with the current settings.
- Follow Selection. A switch that stores a preference the card renderer does not currently read, so turning it on does not change which cards are drawn.
- Thumbnails Only. Hides every card whose preview has not resolved to an image or a rendered structure, leaving only picture cards.
The cards themselves
Each card is built from one point:
- A preview at the top, when the point’s metadata carries a usable image URL or one of the space’s registered renderers can draw one of its values, for example a chemical structure.
- The point’s display title.
- The point’s summary underneath, if it has one.
The border takes the point’s color on the map, and a second outline in the bag color is added when the point belongs to a bag. A line runs from the card back to the point; in 2.5D that line is drawn as a pole standing on a dot at the point’s position.
Drag a card to move it. In 2.5D, left-drag moves it across the plane and right-drag raises or lowers it, which the card’s own tooltip tells you. The close button in the card’s top right corner removes it and drops the card count by one.
How to use it
- Open the panel with nothing selected. Set Card Count to the number of cards you want, then use Cluster Level to choose how coarse the clusters behind them should be.
- Make them readable. Raise Box Size until the summaries fit, and use Font Size to trade text size against how much fits on the card.
- Unclutter the map. Raise Arm Length and Spread Angle to push cards away from their points and from each other, and in 2.5D lift them off the plane with Vertical Height.
- Prune by hand. Drag cards that overlap, and remove the ones you do not want with the close button in their corner.
Limits
- No question and answer sides, no self-grading, no scheduling or spaced repetition, and no export. The cards are a map annotation, not a study deck.
- Bags and vignettes are not card sources. The automatic cards come from clusters only.
- Cards added by clicking a point or by a Composer citation stop at 20.
- Card positions you set by dragging are not saved with the space.