thethirdsixniner/pdf2anki

pdf2anki is a command line tool that turns a PDF full of notes into a ready-to-import Anki flashcard deck. Anki is a popular spaced repetition app that many students use to memorize material, but writing flashcards by hand from lecture notes takes time, and the README argues that most students skip that step entirely as a result. This tool tries to remove that friction: you point it at a PDF and it hands you back a finished deck. Using it is a single command. You run the tool against a PDF, such as a set of cardiology notes, and it reads the text, generates cards, and packages them into an apkg file that you can then import into Anki through the File then Import menu. You can also set a custom output filename and deck name. Under the hood there are three steps. First, the tool extracts clean text from the PDF page by page, cleaning up problems like words split across line breaks. Second, it generates the actual flashcards, and there are two ways to do this. The free, offline heuristic mode looks for common note patterns, like Q and A pairs, term and definition lines, or numbered questions, and turns those into cards. A paid AI mode instead sends chunks of text to Claude to generate cards from messier, unstructured prose, which the README says produces noticeably better results when notes don't already follow a clear pattern. Third, the tool packages everything into a real Anki deck file, keeping stable card IDs so re-importing the same notes updates existing cards rather than creating duplicates. There are a couple of clear limits. Scanned or image-only PDFs will not work directly since the tool needs a text layer to read, you would need to run OCR software first. The free heuristic mode also works best on notes that already have some visible structure, while pure paragraphs of prose need the paid AI mode to get good results. The core tool is released under the MIT license, so it's free to use, modify, and redistribute. The README also mentions a separate hosted Pro version sold on Gumroad for people who don't want to manage their own Anthropic API key, offering a simple double-click app and batch processing of multiple PDFs at once.