backfill-anki-yomitan

Anki add-on to backfill fields including media and audio using Yomitan's API

Installation

1. Install the Yomitan API like specified in the README.
2. Install the add-on from AnkiWeb
3. Restart Anki

Usage

Create a Backup of your profile/deck before doing any of these steps

Make sure your Browser is running and the API is working.

Run on deck

1. Go to Tools -> Backfill from Yomitan in the top bar.
2. Select your deck in the Deck dropdown

Run on select cards

1. Select Cards you want to backfill in Browse
2. Go to Edit -> Backfill from Yomitan in the top bar of the card browser.

General Steps

1. For Expression Field choose the expression field (e.g. Expression in Lapis) of your note type, this is the field that will be queried into Yomitan.
2. Optionally choose a Reading Field (e.g. ExpressionReading in Lapis) to differentiate expressions using their reading. If left blank, the add-on uses the first result Yomitan returns.
3. For Field choose the field to backfilled.
4. In Handlebar type in the Yomitan handlebar, from which you wish to pull data from (e.g. frequency-harmonic-rank). You can concatenate multiple handlebars using a , (e.g. single-glossary-jmdict-2025-08-08,single-glossary-デジタル大辞泉)
5. Optionally tick Replace if you wish to replace the current content of the field in every card.
6. Press Run.

You can cancel backfilling by pressing on the close button of the processing popup. Changes can be undone with Edit -> Undo or with CTRL + Z.

Depending on the dictionaries, backfilling can cause a large amount of inline css to be added to your cards. You can use the Inline CSS Cleanup addon to reduce your collection size.

Presets

You can backfill multiple fields using a .json preset. Presets are stored in the user_files folder in the addon directory. An example for Lapis is included and can be found here.

Format:

{
    "targets": {
        "FieldName": {
            "handlebar": "{handlebar}",
            "replace": true
        },
        "FieldName2": {
            "handlebar": "{handlebar2},{handlebar3}",
            "replace": false
        },
        ...
    }
}

handlebar and replace behave identically to above.

Make sure every handlebar in the preset is a valid handlebar in Yomitan. Otherwise backfilling will fail, because all handlebars are requested in a single API call. For the included Lapis preset, this means adjusting the MainDefinition handlebar to the one matching your preferred dictionary.

Config

Tools -> Add-ons -> backfill-anki-yomitan -> Config

max_entries

Default: 4

Amount of entries to request when Reading Field is specified.

reading_handlebar

Default: reading

Handlebar used to compare against Reading Field.

yomitan_api_ip

Default: 127.0.0.1

yomitan_api_port

Default: 19633

yomitan_api_timeout

Default: 10

Issues

If you're backfilling audio, please be aware that retrieving audio, depending on the audio sources configured in Yomitan, can be quite slow. You can reduce the time by decreasing max_entries in the config.

If you encounter any issues, please report them on GitHub or in the add-on's TMW #resources-sharing thread. Please attach the backfill-log.log file, which can be found in the add-on's user_files directory.

Screenshot