from page to deck
Turn a PDF into flashcards without losing your weekend
Typing cards out of a 60-page lecture PDF is the part most people quietly give up on. Imprimo extracts the text on your iPhone, drafts focused cards with AI, and lets you fix or cut anything before it enters a deck. Then FSRS schedules the reviews, so making the deck and remembering it are no longer two separate jobs.
the difference
Doing it by hand vs doing it in Imprimo
| By hand | Imprimo | |
|---|---|---|
| Get text out of the PDF | Copy-paste page by page, or retype | On-device extraction, no copy-paste |
| Write the cards | Type each question and answer by hand | AI drafts focused cards from the text |
| Catch bad cards | Spot them yourself, later | Review gate to edit or delete before saving |
| Schedule reviews | Separate app, or none | FSRS schedules them automatically |
Import the PDF, skip the typing
Drop in a lecture handout, a textbook chapter, or a slide export. Imprimo pulls the text out on-device and drafts cards from it, so the slow part of making a deck is gone.
Scans and photos too, not just clean PDFs
Vision OCR reads photographed pages and scans, including tables and formulas. If your source is a photo of a printed page rather than a tidy file, it still works.
You approve every card
AI drafts, you decide. A review gate lets you accept, edit, regenerate, or delete each card before it enters a deck, which is how you keep a PDF from turning into a pile of junk cards.
Scheduled with FSRS from the first review
Cards from your PDF go straight into FSRS scheduling, so the app decides when to show each one. Making the deck and remembering it stop being two separate chores.
faq
Common questions about PDF flashcards
How do I turn a PDF into flashcards?
In Imprimo you import the PDF, the app extracts the text on-device, and an AI drafts focused cards from it. You then review the draft, keep the good cards, edit the weak ones, and delete the rest before they enter your deck. The whole pass takes minutes instead of an afternoon of typing.
Is there a free AI flashcard generator from PDF?
Imprimo is a paid app with a free trial, so you can generate cards from a PDF before paying anything. After the trial it is $12.49 a month or $74.99 a year. There are free web generators, but most cap how much you can process and do not schedule your reviews afterward, which is the part that decides whether the cards stick.
Does it work on scanned pages and handwritten notes?
Scanned pages, yes. Imprimo uses Apple's Vision framework to read text from photos and scans, including tables and formulas, then generates cards from it. Clean handwriting can work, but messy handwriting is hit or miss, the same way it is for any OCR.
What happens to my PDF after I upload it?
Text extraction happens on your device first, so a 50MB PDF is reduced to the text that actually matters before anything is sent for card generation. Your content is not used to train third-party models. Review runs offline once the cards exist.
Can I make Anki cards from a PDF instead?
You can, but Anki has no built-in PDF import, so you need a third-party add-on and some setup before it works. If you want the cards generated and scheduled in one app without that friction, a tool with native PDF import is the faster route. The walkthrough below covers both paths.
related reading
Go deeper on card creation
ready when you are
Stop retyping your PDFs into cards
Imprimo drafts the cards from your PDF, lets you fix them, and schedules the reviews with FSRS, natively on iPhone.
Download on the App Store