How to Make Anki Cards from PDFs: The Complete Guide

Your professor uploads lecture slides as PDFs. Your textbook is a 500-page PDF. That research paper you need to know? PDF.

PDFs are the universal format of academic content. But getting that content into Anki? That's where things get painful.

Here's how to do it—from manual methods to modern solutions.

The manual method (what most people do)

1. Open PDF in one window
2. Open Anki in another window
3. Read a section of the PDF
4. Alt-tab to Anki
5. Create a new card
6. Type out the question
7. Type out the answer
8. Repeat 200 times
9. Question your life choices

This works. It's also incredibly tedious. A 30-page chapter can take 3-4 hours to convert into cards.

Method 2: Copy-paste with formatting

Slightly faster:

1. Highlight text in PDF
2. Copy (Ctrl+C)
3. Paste into Anki card
4. Clean up formatting (PDF copy-paste is messy)
5. Split into question and answer
6. Repeat

Problems:

• PDF text selection is often broken (especially scanned documents)
• Formatting gets mangled
• You still have to manually structure each card
• Images don't copy well

Method 3: PDF annotation tools

Some people use PDF readers that let you:

• Highlight text
• Export highlights to a file
• Import that file into Anki

Tools: Zotero, Polar, Highlights app

Better, but:

• Setup is complicated
• You're still just getting raw highlights, not formatted cards
• Doesn't work well with all PDFs

Method 4: ChatGPT (the 2023+ approach)

1. Copy text from PDF
2. Paste into ChatGPT
3. Prompt: "Turn this into Anki flashcards"
4. Copy the output
5. Manually paste each card into Anki

Improvement, but still painful:

• ChatGPT output format rarely matches what Anki needs
• You're doing a lot of copy-paste between three different apps
• No images
• Have to manually fix formatting issues

What actually makes a good PDF-to-Anki workflow?

The ideal workflow would:

1. Read the PDF directly (no copy-paste)
2. Understand the content (not just extract text)
3. Generate properly formatted cards (atomic facts, cloze deletions)
4. Handle images (diagrams, figures, charts)
5. Sync to Anki (without manual import/export)

Using image occlusion for diagrams

PDFs often contain diagrams that are worth memorizing:

• Anatomical structures
• Flowcharts
• Graphs and charts
• Chemical structures

For these, text cards don't work well. You need Image Occlusion:

1. Screenshot the diagram from your PDF
2. Use Anki's Image Occlusion add-on (or the built-in feature in newer versions)
3. Draw boxes over the parts you want to hide
4. Each box becomes a separate card

This is powerful for visual content but adds even more time to the workflow.

The real bottleneck

Here's the truth: the bottleneck isn't Anki. Anki is great at reviewing cards.

The bottleneck is creating cards from source material.

For every hour you spend reviewing in Anki, you might spend 2-3 hours creating cards. That ratio is backwards.

Oboeru: PDF to Anki in seconds

This is the problem Oboeru was built to solve.

The workflow:

1. Drop your PDF into Oboeru
2. AI reads and understands the content
3. Cards are generated automatically—atomic facts, proper formatting, cloze deletions
4. Review the cards, edit anything you want to change
5. One-click sync to your Anki decks

What you get:

• Cards that follow flashcard best practices
• Support for text, images, and diagrams
• Direct Anki sync via AnkiConnect
• Hours saved per PDF

A 30-page chapter that would take 3 hours manually? Done in 5 minutes.

Your PDFs have the knowledge. Oboeru gets it into your head faster.