The practice button in the upper-right corner of any document can be used to practice the cards in that document. (You can also study a document from the Flashcard Home.)
When you practice a document, RemNote tries to intelligently show you all the flashcards that belong to that topic. However, because of RemNote’s flexibility, “in a document” is a somewhat nebulous concept – relevant flashcards could be in portals or tables in that document, rather than physically within the document, for instance. Therefore, RemNote needs to gather cards from several different places to show you the relevant cards.
In most cases, this will just work and you won’t have to think about it at all, but if you’re encountering a situation where cards you expect to appear are not appearing, or cards you don’t expect to appear are appearing, the following list of rules will help you understand what’s going on.
Gathering rules
The word document in these rules refers to any Rem which is shown as the document title (large text at the top of the screen) and is being practiced. Usually this is an actual document, but it’s possible to zoom in to some Rem that is not a document and practice that, and the same rules apply in that case.
Unless otherwise noted, gathering is recursive. That is, suppose within document A RemNote finds a Rem B, and the rules say Rem B will be checked for flashcards. Then, after gathering any cards that are within Rem B itself, RemNote pretends that Rem B is the “document” and checks all of the ways that cards could be gathered from within document B, potentially gathering Rems C and D within it, which are then checked for cards within those... The recursion continues for as many levels as necessary until there are no more connections (or it loops back on itself and includes an item that’s already been checked).
Unless otherwise noted, gathering is unidirectional: if a document A includes cards from B, this does not imply that practicing B includes cards from document A.
RemNote checks the following places in each document for cards, and for other documents containing cards recursively:
The document itself (if its title is a card).
All direct descendants of the document.
Rems that are tagged by the document or its descendants (that is, instances of the document or its descendants).
Rems in portals located within the document, if and only if they are visible within the portal (not collapsed and not hidden).
Exception: Cards in “List” views of tags are included regardless of whether they are visible, following the rules for tables. This is to avoid a situation where changing the view from “Table” to “List” suddenly changes the set of cards that are usable in the document.
Rems in tables located within the document:
Cards that are generated by a property of a table within the document.
Cards that are a descendant of the Rem of any table row (properties / columns as well as any other children of that Rem).
If a row is not shown because of an active filter, it will not be checked for flashcards.
If a column is not shown because it’s hidden, those properties will still be checked for flashcards.
Rems that are referenced within the document, or Rems that reference a Rem within the document (backreferences / backlinks).
However, referenced card gathering is not recursive: only the specific Rem which is referenced or backreferenced is checked for flashcards, not its descendants, tagged Rems, etc.
Rems that are sources of the document.