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How to make Anki flashcards from a PDF

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Turn lecture notes or a textbook chapter into an Anki deck in minutes: generate the cards with AI, import them with File → Import, and keep the deck worth reviewing.

Anki is one of the best ways to remember what you study, but making the cards takes a long time. If your course material is in PDFs, you can let AI draft the cards from the PDF and import them into Anki in a couple of minutes. This guide shows how, and how to get a deck worth reviewing.

Step 1: Choose what goes into the deck

One deck per lecture or chapter works better than one giant deck per course. Reviews stay manageable, and you can see which topics are giving you trouble. If your PDF covers a whole module, you do not need to split it: add it to the PDF to Anki page, tick Only use some pages and enter the pages for one lecture.

The PDF must contain selectable text. Open it and try to highlight a sentence; if you can, it will work. Scanned pages behave like photos and cannot be read yet.

Step 2: Generate the cards

Choose how many cards you want. As a rough guide, 10 to 20 cards cover a typical one-hour lecture, and 30 to 50 suit a long textbook chapter. Pick a difficulty: Easy asks about facts and definitions stated directly, Hard asks you to explain and connect ideas. Then press Make flashcards. It takes about 20 seconds.

Before exporting, flip through the cards on the site. It takes a minute and shows you whether the deck covers what you need. If a card is not useful, you can delete it in Anki after importing.

Step 3: Export and import into Anki

  1. Under Export to, press Anki. A small text file downloads.
  2. Open Anki on your computer (version 2.1.55 or newer).
  3. Choose File → Import and select the file.
  4. Check the preview and press Import. The deck is named after your document, and every card is tagged pdfquizgenerator.
  5. Sync, and the deck appears on your phone in AnkiMobile or AnkiDroid.

Question-and-answer cards use Anki's Basic note type. Fill-in-the-blank questions become Cloze notes, with the key term hidden, which is ideal for vocabulary and definitions.

Tips for a deck worth reviewing

  • Delete what you already know. Suspending or deleting easy cards early saves hours of reviews later.
  • Rewrite unclear cards in your own words. Editing a card is itself a form of studying.
  • Review every day, even briefly. Anki's spacing only works if you keep up with the cards that are due.
  • Make a new deck each week from that week's notes, instead of cramming a whole course before the exam. Our guide to active recall explains why.

Prefer Quizlet, or no app at all?

The same cards can be pasted into Quizlet (press Quizlet under Export to), or studied right on the site: flip each card, mark it I knew it or Still learning, and go over the ones you are still learning until you know them all.

Try it with your own PDF. Free, no sign-up, and your file never leaves your device.

Make a quiz

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