Photograph a page and turn it into flashcards

The material you need to memorise is usually already written down — in a textbook, on a whiteboard, in a handout, in your own handwriting. The work is not producing it; the work is getting it off the paper and into something that tests you.

Quat reads it off the page. Point the camera, and the text becomes a note, and the note becomes flashcards on a spaced-repetition schedule.

The steps

1. Open Quat, go to the Capture tab, and choose Scan.
2. Photograph the page — a textbook spread, a whiteboard before it is erased, a printed handout, or handwritten notes. Capture needs a connection; everything after it works offline.
3. Quat reads the text off the photo and writes it into a note.
4. Check the note. OCR is good and not perfect — a superscript or a smudged line is worth a two-second fix now, because the cards inherit whatever the note says.
5. Quat builds the flashcards. Each carries its origin — SCAN · AUG 02 · PHARM P.214 — so a card that surfaces in three weeks can point you back at the exact page.
6. Review on schedule. Sessions end when the day's cards are done.

Worth knowing before you shoot

• Flat page, even light, fill the frame. Most OCR failures are photography failures.
• The whiteboard case is the one to remember: it is the material with the shortest lifespan, and a photo before the eraser arrives is the whole trick.
• Handwriting works. The messier it is, the more step 4 matters.

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. No account, no sign-up; your notes and cards stay on the device.

The other two captures

You can also record a lecture or paste a link — the same pipeline, a different stamp.