Turn any PDF into Anki flashcards.
Clozely is a PDF to Anki converter that works the way you already read. Open the PDF, highlight the sentence that matters, pick the words to hide, and the finished cloze card goes straight to Anki.
Windows & macOS · Free · Works with Anki
Read. Highlight. Send.
No copy-paste, no export files to babysit, no switching apps. Your PDF and your cards stay open in the same window.
Open the PDF
A textbook chapter, a journal paper, a slide handout. Long documents are fine.
Highlight a sentence
It becomes a card. Then highlight the word or phrase inside it to hide. Selections snap to word boundaries, and you can resize any highlight by dragging its edge.
Send to Anki
One click. Cards land in your own Anki decks with tags carried over, ready to review on any device Anki runs on.
Scanned PDFs work too.
Old course packets, lab handouts, scanned chapters — Clozely reads them with OCR and you highlight the page like any other. No separate conversion step.
Multi-blank cards
Put multiple cloze deletions on the same card. Each color is a separate blank, and every deletion goes exactly where you place it.
Figures become cards
Drag a box around a diagram to put it on a card, or cover its labels for image occlusion. The diagrams and tables become cards too, not just the prose.
Cards remember their page
Click any card later and Clozely scrolls the PDF back to the sentence it came from. Context is one click away when a card stops making sense.
AI, if you want it
Optional: hand the chapter to Clozely AI for a first draft and approve the cards you like. Highlighting never needs a subscription.
Convert a whole PDF into an Anki deck.
Highlight the PDF yourself, or use the Anki card generator to draft cards. Each card appears on the source as a highlight and links to its source sentence with one click. You can send the finished cards to one of your existing Anki decks, or a new deck, with one click.
Questions, answered
How do I convert a PDF to Anki flashcards for free?
Download Clozely free. Open a PDF, highlight what matters, and send your cards to Anki. No credit card required. The cards you make stay yours forever.
Do scanned PDFs work?
Yes. Clozely detects scanned pages and reads them with OCR, so you can highlight them the way you would digital text.
Does it handle journal papers with two columns?
Yes. Highlights follow the text flow, and selections snap to word boundaries.
Can it convert a whole textbook at once?
You can open a whole textbook and work through it, and with the Clozely AI you can draft cards from a full chapter or page range.
What about PowerPoints and Word documents?
Clozely also opens PPTX and DOCX files, plus websites in a built-in browser. See PowerPoint to Anki and the how-to guide.
Can I export the cards as an .apkg file?
Yes. There are two ways to get cards into Anki: Send to Anki, which goes live through AnkiConnect, or Export .apkg, which gives you a file. Both use stable IDs, so sending or importing again updates your existing notes instead of duplicating them.
Is Clozely an Anki add-on?
No. Clozely is its own desktop app for Windows and macOS. You read and highlight in Clozely, then send the finished cards to Anki. There's nothing to install inside Anki and no API key to set up.
Why not just paste the PDF into ChatGPT?
It works for a page or two. For a long PDF you end up pasting chunk by chunk, fixing the formatting for Anki, and fact-checking every card by hand because the model wrote the facts from memory. Clozely reads the whole document, makes real Anki cards, and anchors each AI card to the exact sentence it came from. Checking a card means glancing at the highlight, not searching the PDF.
Try it on tonight's reading.
The app is free, with no credit card.