PDF to Flashcards

Convert a PDF in three steps

• 1. Open your PDF with the button above.
• 2. Review the cards. Smart import shows the cards it found. Delete anything you don't want and fix fronts and backs.
• 3. Add to a deck and study, print, or export.

The whole process happens in your browser tab. Large PDFs take a little longer because your own computer is doing the work.

What kinds of PDFs work best

Smart import reads structure, so PDFs that already have some work best:

• Glossaries and vocabulary lists ("term – definition")
• Lecture slides with a heading and bullet points on each slide
• Review sheets with questions and answers
• Tables, such as drug names and classes, or dates and events
• Notes with bold key terms

Long paragraphs of textbook prose give fewer cards. You can still pull out cloze cards from sentences containing dates, numbers, or names, or turn on the optional on-device AI on desktop. See the flashcard generator page for details on both.

Scanned PDFs and OCR

Some PDFs are just pictures of pages, with no selectable text. When we find no text, we automatically run OCR (text recognition) on your device, up to the first 50 pages. English works immediately. For other languages, choose the language and a small data file is downloaded once from a public CDN.

OCR quality depends on the scan. Straight, high-contrast pages work well; photos taken at an angle or faint handwriting will need more editing afterwards.

Images from the PDF

If you need a labelled diagram from a PDF — anatomy, a map, a circuit — take a screenshot of it and paste it into an image occlusion card. Draw boxes over the labels and each box becomes its own card.

Your file stays on your computer

We don't have a server that receives your PDF. The file is read by code running in your browser and the resulting cards are stored locally on your device. That makes it safe to use with course material you'd rather not upload, and once you've converted a PDF here, the reader is cached so later conversions also work offline.

Example: a lecture slide becomes cards

Say a slide is titled "Types of muscle tissue" and has three bullets: "Skeletal – voluntary, striated", "Cardiac – involuntary, striated, found in the heart", "Smooth – involuntary, non-striated, found in organ walls". Smart import recognises the term–definition pattern in each bullet and creates three cards: "Skeletal" → "voluntary, striated", and so on. The heading tells you the topic, which you can keep in the deck name or as a tag.

A glossary page works the same way, one card per entry. A table of drug names and drug classes becomes one card per row. A review sheet with numbered questions and answers becomes one card per question.

After import, it's worth a quick read-through. Sometimes a definition that runs over two lines is split, or a heading is picked up as a card. Fixing those takes seconds in the table editor, and you can turn any card into a cloze card or a reverse card if that suits the material better.