Turn a PDF into flashcards you'll actually review
Upload the reading, the slide deck or the handout, and eNotee reads the whole document and writes front-and-back cards from it. Reviews then run on spaced repetition, so the cards you keep getting wrong come back sooner and the ones you know get out of your way.
What you can feed it
- PDF files — readings, past papers, handouts, textbook chapters
- Lecture slides, once exported to PDF
- Word documents (DOCX and DOC)
- Up to 15 MB per file on Starter, 25 MB on Student, 50 MB on Scholar
How it works
- 01
Upload the document
Drag in the PDF or Word file. eNotee resolves the format on the server rather than trusting the file extension, so a mislabelled file is rejected at the picker with a specific reason instead of failing silently after a long upload.
- 02
The whole document is read, not just the first pages
The document is chunked and each chunk is digested separately, then the results are combined. That matters for anything longer than a few pages — a single-pass summariser effectively ignores everything after its context runs out.
- 03
Cards come back, and reviews start scheduling themselves
Rate a card Again, Hard, Good or Easy. The first two successful reviews are fixed at one day and six days, after which the interval grows according to how well you have been doing on that specific card.
What comes back
Exactly what you get
- Front-and-back flashcards
- Plain term-and-definition style pairs generated from the document's own content.
- A spaced-repetition schedule
- SM-2 with four ratings. Cards you rate Again come back almost immediately; cards you rate Easy stretch out fast, so revision time concentrates on what you do not know.
- A summary and key points from the same document
- Generated alongside the cards, so you can read the overview before you start drilling.
- Exam-style questions, if you want them
- The same document can produce multiple-choice or theory questions on demand.
Under the hood
How it actually handles this
Page budgets, and why they exist
Generation costs roughly one model call per seven pages, so an uncapped 450-page textbook would be about 65 calls. Instead there is a per-document page budget — 200 pages on Starter, 400 on Student, 1,500 on Scholar — and eNotee processes that many and tells you plainly rather than quietly truncating. You can upload a big book on any plan; the cheaper plans just work through less of it at a time.
Word documents take a different route to PDFs
There is no LibreOffice on the serverless backend, so DOCX and DOC are converted to HTML on the server and rendered from that rather than being turned into a PDF first. The text extraction is equivalent; complex layouts and embedded objects survive less faithfully than they would in a PDF.
A monthly page allowance sits behind the per-file one
120 pages a month on free, 3,000 on Student, uncapped on Scholar. That exists so a per-document cap cannot be sidestepped by splitting a textbook into chapter-sized uploads, and so a plan's cost stays predictable.
What it doesn’t do
Worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.
- Scanned PDFs with no text layer will not work well. If you cannot select the text in your PDF reader, eNotee cannot read it either.
- PowerPoint files are not accepted. Export the deck to PDF first.
- Photographs of handwritten notes are not supported at all.
- Heavily mathematical or diagram-driven pages generate weaker cards than prose — the cards come from text, and a diagram's meaning is mostly not in its caption.
- There is no image occlusion. If that is central to how you revise anatomy, this is the wrong tool and StudyFetch does it.
Questions
- Can I upload my lecture slides?
- Yes, once they are exported to PDF. PowerPoint files are not accepted directly. Most lecturers distribute slides as PDF already, so in practice this is usually not an extra step.
- What happens with a 400-page textbook?
- You can upload it on any plan. How much gets processed depends on your tier — 40 pages on free, 400 on Student, 1,500 on Scholar — and eNotee tells you how far it got rather than pretending it read the whole thing.
- Will it work on a scanned PDF?
- Not reliably. eNotee reads the text layer of a PDF; a scan is an image of text with no such layer. If you cannot select the words in your PDF reader, expect poor results.
- How many flashcards do I get?
- It depends on the document — cards are generated from what is actually in it. Flashcards are uncapped on every paid plan, including Starter.
Also worth a look
Try it on one thing tonight.
Try any plan free for 14 days, no card. Starter then covers 10 PDF uploads a month at up to 15 MB and 200 pages each, 1,000 pages a month in total, and unlimited flashcards.
14-day free trial · no card needed.