figgydeck 1.0.0

Turn textbooks into study decks: extract figures, tables, and captions from chapter PDFs and package them as PowerPoint slides or Anki decks.

figgydeck

Turn textbooks into study decks. Extract figures, tables, and their captions from chapter PDFs, then package them as PowerPoint slides or Anki flashcard decks.

figgydeck reads a chapter PDF and finds every figure and table along with its caption. It gives you one slide or card per figure — the image on the face, and the caption plus book/chapter/page metadata attached — the format you actually want for visual recall or lecture review.

Two output formats, same extraction:

• PowerPoint (.pptx) — one slide per figure/table, image centered with its aspect ratio preserved and the metadata in the slide's speaker notes. Opens in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides.
• Anki (.apkg) — one card per figure/table, image on the front and the caption + metadata on the back. Imports straight into Anki.

Why

Manually building slides or flashcards from a 40-figure chapter takes hours. The two hard parts are (1) matching extracted images to their figure numbers — PDF stream order is often shuffled — and (2) cleaning captions of running headers and footnotes that bleed in. figgydeck does both with pure-Python signal processing (font sizes, spatial geometry, ruled-line detection); no LLM call required for the standard Elsevier textbook layout.

Install

pip install figgydeck

System requirements: poppler (for pdftoppm and pdfimages).

# macOS
brew install poppler

# Debian/Ubuntu
sudo apt install poppler-utils

PowerPoint output (--format pptx) needs an optional extra:

pip install "figgydeck[pptx]"

Usage

# One command, chapter PDF → figure deck (figures only by default)
figgydeck chapter1.pdf \
    --book "Example Textbook (1st ed., 2020)" \
    --chapter "Ch. 3: Cell Structure" \
    --format apkg \
    --output ./out/

# Output — just the deck (the extracted images are embedded inside it):
#   out/ExampleTextbook1StEd2020_Ch3CellStructure.apkg     ← import into Anki

Also include table cards (extra pdftoppm rasterization per table):

figgydeck chapter1.pdf --book "..." --chapter "..." --tables

Choose your output format(s) with --format/-f (required; repeatable or comma-separated):

figgydeck chapter1.pdf --book "..." --chapter "..." --format apkg          # only .apkg
figgydeck chapter1.pdf --book "..." --chapter "..." --format pptx          # only .pptx
figgydeck chapter1.pdf --book "..." --chapter "..." --format apkg,pptx     # both

--format is required — there is no default. PowerPoint output needs the optional [pptx] extra (see Install).

Keeping the extraction artifacts

By default the output directory holds only the decks; the extracted images are embedded inside them. To also keep the raw intermediates, pass --save-images (writes an images/ folder) and/or --save-manifest (writes manifest.json, the structured list of everything that was extracted):

figgydeck chapter1.pdf --book "..." --chapter "..." --format apkg \
    --save-manifest --save-images
#   out/...apkg          ← the deck
#   out/manifest.json    ← inspect what was extracted
#   out/images/          ← extracted figures

Multiple chapters

Pass more than one chapter PDF in a single command. Give one --chapter per PDF (in order), or omit --chapter entirely to derive each title from its filename (ch01.pdf → "Chapter 1"):

# one artifact per chapter (like running figgydeck once per PDF)
figgydeck ch01.pdf ch02.pdf ch03.pdf --book "..." --format pptx

# --combine merges every chapter into ONE artifact per format
figgydeck ch01.pdf ch02.pdf ch03.pdf --book "..." --combine --format apkg,pptx
#   out/<Book>_Combined.pptx   ← one deck: title slide + all figures
#   out/<Book>_Combined.apkg   ← one Anki package, one subdeck per chapter

With multiple PDFs, when you keep artifacts (--save-manifest/--save-images) each chapter's files go in their own out/NN_<slug>/ subdir (so identical image names don't collide). Slide images keep their native aspect ratio and are centered — nothing is stretched or cropped.

How it works

For an Elsevier-format chapter, figgydeck:

1. Extracts all embedded images via pdfimages
2. Walks each PDF page with pdfplumber, identifying:
   • FIGURE X.Y / TABLE X.Y labels by font size (~9 pt label font)
   • caption text by font size (8 pt) within column-aware bounding boxes
   • table regions by horizontal-rule detection
3. Matches each label to the nearest image whose bottom edge sits just above it in the same column — robust to images appearing in shuffled stream order
4. Crops table regions from rasterized pages
5. Cleans captions (strips running headers, decodes ligatures, de-hyphenates line wraps)
6. Builds your chosen deck(s) — .apkg and/or .pptx (optionally emitting the intermediate manifest.json / images/ with --save-manifest / --save-images)

On a well-behaved Elsevier-format chapter this reliably matches every figure to its caption and crops tables with their full titles.

What you get

Both formats carry the same content — the figure or table image plus its caption and book/chapter/page metadata — laid out for the way you'll use it.

PowerPoint slides (.pptx)

• One slide per figure/table, image centered and scaled to fit with its aspect ratio preserved (no cropping)
• Number, title, caption, book, chapter, and page in the slide's speaker notes
• A combined deck (--combine) opens with a title slide (book + chapter count)

Anki cards (.apkg)

• A clean two-side layout that's readable in both light and dark mode
• Front: image only, with a small Fig X.Y tag below
• Back: type label, caption, and book/chapter/page metadata
• Stable note GUIDs based on (book, chapter, type, number) — re-importing updates existing cards rather than duplicating them

AI assistance

Built with help from Claude Code. All code is human-reviewed.