Hey everyone,
I’m a med student and spent way too many hours every semester manually turning lecture PDFs into Anki cards. Existing tools I found were either paid subscriptions with monthly deck limits, or didn’t handle dense/technical text well.
So I built pdf2anki — it takes a PDF and outputs a ready-to-import .apkg file. It’s free, open-source, and runs locally so nothing gets uploaded anywhere.
Repo: pdf2anki
Still actively improving it, so if anyone tries it I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on what breaks or what’s missing — especially on messier PDFs (scanned docs, weird formatting, etc.). Not trying to sell anything, just want it to actually be useful for people who deal with the same problem.
Time well spent. Don’t try to ankify everything. Make a few high-impact cards for every topic. Focus on quality images to illustrate key concepts, add screenshots from e.g. books or lectures as extra information on the back of your cards. Read this extra information deliberately (when needed) after reviewing the card.
I’m also a medical student, and I need to memorize a lot of content. Maybe you could try this software: PDF Guru Anki. You can take content that you’ve highlighted or annotated in WPS or other PDF editors, and turn it into cloze-deletion cards. Unfortunately, the developer passed away this May from a heart attack at just 27 years old. In the early morning of the day before he died, he was still dealing with some user issues. That said, thanks to his unremitting efforts, the software is already quite mature. Updates are currently suspended, and sales are now handled by his family. There should be a free usage quota — you can give it a try.
https:// guru. kevin2li .top /
i am a med school student too, but failing.
however, any PDF --LLM–> anki solutions are worst then me.
For example, criteria of type 2 diabetes would be twice of fasting blood glucose >= 7.0, among others.
the LLMs usually will make a card:
what is the diagnosis if “twice blood glucose >= 7.0”, ask for answer of diabetes;
instead, it should ask for the diagnosis criteria of diabetes.
if you freestyle on LLM chatbots, you could immediately ask the LLM to ask for dx criteria;
using any FIXED tools, i dont see the point.
the other long not solved trouble:
anki+plugin could grab e.g. ecg of pericarditis;
you wish u make tons of ecg of pericarditis to exam you to “read ecg, make diagnosis of pericarditis”.
sorry, in reality, 9/10 it will grab back ppts that contain ecg pericarditis, text only.
this is the reality.
this shd be just a clone of ios’s marginnote or windows’s BookxNote Pro,
it’s like PDF —manually–> mindmap → anki
one may see obsidian_to_anki; or my mm2ak mindmanager mindmap to anki.
no, these are pre-LLM era old stuff.
yes, these are how our seniors passed the med school.