Friend of mine in M2 was prepping a NeuroAnatomy block, opened a 60-page PDF chapter, and started typing flashcards by hand. I asked why he wasn't using one of the AI flashcard tools — he said every one he'd tried generated cards that looked plausible but were either wrong or weren't in the actual document. Bad cards in your deck haunt you for weeks because of how SR works, so he didn't trust them.
So I built a small tool, letsgopdf.app, with a different approach: every card cites the source page, e.g. "What is Wallenberg syndrome?" → "Lateral medullary syndrome from PICA occlusion (p. 14)". You click the (p. 14) and it scrolls to that page in the preview pane, so you can verify in 3 seconds whether the card is faithful before importing.
How it works:
- Drop the PDF (or Word/PowerPoint chapter — auto-converts)
- Pick 10/25/50 cards, Basic Q/A or Cloze
- Optional focus hint ("only the drug interactions", "skip the embryology")
- Cards stream in, each with a page citation
- Download as Anki CSV → File → Import → done
The PDF itself doesn't leave your browser — text extraction runs client-side via pdf.js, only the plain text goes to the AI. So your annotated First Aid stays on your machine.
Honest caveats:
- AI is a strong first-draft, not gospel. Verify-then-import is the workflow I recommend; the page citation makes that fast.
- Doesn't work on scanned PDFs (you need to OCR first — there's a free tool for that on the same site)
- Cloze mode currently only supports {{c1::}} per card; multi-cloze is on the roadmap
- Long textbooks (>40 pages of dense text) — split into chapters first for better cards
Would love feedback from anyone who tries it on real study material. What I'm most curious about: does the page-citation thing actually solve the trust problem, or is there something else that's keeping you typing cards by hand?