Turn a PDF into flashcards on your iPhone

The reading is already written, already assigned, and already on your phone — a chapter scan in Canvas, a handout someone emailed, a study guide in iCloud Drive. It is the material you will be examined on, and it is sitting in a file that cannot ask you a single question.

Retyping it into a flashcard app is the step nobody has time for. What follows is how to get cards out of a PDF without retyping it, including the part that decides whether any tool will work at all.

First, find out which kind of PDF you have

There are two kinds, and they look identical until you test them. Open the PDF and try to select a sentence, or search it for a word you can see on the page.

• If the text highlights, it is a text PDF. It was exported from a word processor or typesetter, and the words are really in the file.
• If nothing highlights and search finds nothing, it is a scanned PDF — photographs of pages in a PDF wrapper. To software, every page is a picture.

This is worth two seconds of your time because most tools that turn PDFs into cards run a text extractor over the file. On a text PDF that works. On a scanned PDF the extractor comes back with nothing, and what you get is either an error or, worse, a thin deck built from the few words that were selectable. Check first, then choose the tool.

Quat handles both, and for a specific reason: a PDF is sent to the model as a PDF rather than being run through a text extractor first, so pages that are images are read as images. A scan of a photocopied chapter works. A photograph of a page that was already crooked and half in shadow works less well, the same way it would for a person.

The steps

1. Open Quat, go to the Capture tab, and choose File.
2. Press Choose a file and pick the document. Anything the Files app can reach counts — iCloud Drive, Downloads, an attachment you saved. Quat reads PDF, .docx, .pptx, .xlsx, and plain text or HTML.
3. Quat opens the file on the device and shows you what it found: the file name, what kind of file it is, and what it will spend — for a PDF, its page count. Nothing has been sent yet, and nothing has been charged.
4. Add a focus line if the document is broader than what you need — "key concepts and examples", or "just the definitions". Tags go in at the same step.
5. Press Make a note. This is the step that sends the document, and it needs a connection. Quat reads it and writes a note.
6. Read the note before you card it. It is yours to edit, and the cards inherit whatever it says.
7. Let Quat build the flashcards. Each one prints where it came from — DOC · AUG 26 · ORGANIC CHEM — so a card that surfaces in three weeks can send you back to the file. Then review: the schedule brings each card back, and the session ends when the day's cards are done.

How many pages you can actually do

• 50 pages is the hard cap for one PDF. Past that Quat refuses before anything is sent, and tells you to split it by chapter.
• A PDF spends one capture per page. Photo and document captures share a monthly allowance: 20 on the free tier, 300 with a subscription. So one 20-page reading is the entire free month, and a 12-page handout leaves you eight. On a subscription, 300 pages a month is roughly six 50-page chapters.
• A .docx, .pptx, .xlsx or text file spends exactly one, however long it is, because it is reduced to text on the device before it goes. There is a length ceiling on that text; a document too long to read in one go is refused with a suggestion to split it.
• A whole textbook does not fit, and nothing here pretends otherwise. If you want cards from a 400-page book, the unit of work is a chapter, and it always was.

Worth knowing

• Split by chapter even when you do not have to. A 50-page dump of four unrelated topics produces vague cards; one chapter with one focus line produces cards you can answer. Preview and export a page range in the Files app, or ask for the chapter PDF rather than the whole reader.
• Legacy Office files — .doc, .ppt, .xls, the ones from before 2007 — are refused by name, with the fix: save the file as .docx, .pptx, .xlsx or PDF and try again. Guessing at their contents would make confidently wrong notes, which is worse than a refusal.
• Slide decks card well when the slides carry text and badly when every slide is a picture of a diagram. If a deck is mostly images, export it to PDF so the pages are read as pages.
• Whatever tool you use, look for a stated page limit and a stated monthly allowance before you hand over a whole chapter. Most of the free web tools publish neither, which usually means you find the ceiling by hitting it.
• If the material is on paper rather than in a file, do not scan it to PDF first — photograph it instead. Same allowance, one step fewer.

What it costs

Reviewing, exams and games are free without limit. A subscription raises the monthly ceilings on the parts that call a model — capture, the tutor, and card generation. There is no account and no sign-up. Reading the file to show you its name, kind and page count happens on the device and sends nothing; making the note is the step that sends the document, and the note and cards it produces stay on your phone.

The other three captures

A file is one of four ways in. You can also record a lecture, photograph a page, or paste a link — the same note-then-cards pipeline, with a different stamp.