Right after you import a template, the preview shows {{FieldName}}
placeholders as gray pills. That's enough to check the structure, but there's no
way to judge how a font size or color will actually read until real content is
sitting in that spot. A pill can't answer "is 40px too big for an English word?"
Open Field sample values at the bottom of the left panel and it expands into one input box per field the editor detected in your template. Type in something a real card would contain — say "apple" in the Word field and "the round red fruit" in the Meaning field — and the preview updates immediately. Clear a box and it goes back to showing the pill.
A few things worth knowing —
- If you started from a built-in preset (Basic, etc.) in the Import dialog, the samples are pre-filled with the field names themselves. Replacing them with your own card's content makes the preview more accurate.
- For a Cloze template, just type
{{c1::content}}syntax directly into the Text field's sample. The preview will show the blank actually hidden, the way it would in a real cloze card. - Sample values are preview-only. They never make it into the template code that [Copy Code] copies, so fill them in as freely as you like.
- Saving to My Templates saves the sample values along with everything else.
Get in the habit of filling in samples before you start fine-tuning a template, and you'll avoid the frustrating "looked done, but reads awkwardly on a real card" surprise.