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Can You Print Flashcards From Anki? Yes — Here’s Every Method That Works

Short answer: yes, you can print flashcards from Anki, but not with a Print button — Anki does not have one. You print Anki cards either by installing one of four printing add-ons, or by exporting your notes as plain text and printing that file yourself.

This question comes up constantly and never gets a straight answer. Search it and the top result is a thread on r/Anki asking “Is there a way to print my anki flashcards?” — a real person asking a real question, with the useful part buried in replies. Below that sit four separate AnkiWeb add-on listings, none of which explains how it compares to the other three, and a thread on the official Anki forums about exporting flashcards with formatting. So here is the whole picture in one place: every route that actually prints Anki flashcards, what each one produces, and the formatting trap that ruins most printed cards.

The 60-second version

  • Anki has no print feature. Its File menu offers Export, not Print.
  • Four add-ons add printing: Basic Printing Support (code 1025789669), Extended Printing Support (1744020821), Papercards (2042118948), and Print Selected Cards (538768728).
  • No add-on? Use File > Export → Notes in Plain Text, then lay the file out in a spreadsheet or word processor and print.
  • The trap: Anki cards are HTML and CSS. Heavily styled cards print badly. Simple cards print fine.

Why Anki has no Print button

Anki was built as a scheduling engine, not a document tool. Its job is to decide which card you see today, and everything in the interface serves that. When you open File > Export, the Anki manual documents what you actually get: Notes in Plain Text, which writes your notes into a text file with each field separated by a tab; an Anki Deck Package (.apkg), which bundles cards, notes, note types and media for sharing a single deck; and an Anki Collection Package (.colpkg), which does the same for your entire collection and is meant as a backup or a device-to-device transfer.

Every one of those is a file for another copy of Anki to read. None of them is paper. That is the entire reason printing Anki flashcards feels harder than it should be — you are not looking for a hidden setting, you are looking for a bridge between a scheduling app and a printer, and that bridge is either an add-on or a file you lay out yourself.

Method 1–4: the printing add-ons, compared

Install any of these the same way: in Anki, go to Tools > Add-ons, click Get Add-ons, and paste the numeric code. That flow is documented in the add-ons section of the Anki manual. Restart Anki afterwards.

Basic Printing Support — add-on code 1025789669

  • How it works: Install the add-on, pick your deck, and let it generate a web page of your cards. The add-on opens your browser with the generated page automatically.
  • What you get: An HTML web page containing your cards. From there you use your browser's own Print dialog — which is also how you save the deck as a PDF.
  • Best for: The simplest possible route. If you just want your cards on paper and you do not care about layout control, start here.
  • Watch out: You are printing through a browser, so the page breaks are the browser's decision, not yours. Print preview before you commit paper to it.

Extended Printing Support — add-on code 1744020821

  • How it works: Install it, select the deck you want to print, then go to Tools and choose "Extended cards printing…". You get a settings screen before anything is generated.
  • What you get: A printable document built from your chosen print settings.
  • Best for: Anyone who wants control — cards per page, what shows on the front, whether answers print alongside questions or on a separate sheet.
  • Watch out: More settings means more ways to get a layout you did not want. Do one test page before printing a 400-card deck.

Papercards — add-on code 2042118948

  • How it works: Install, then run it as an exporter over the cards you want on paper.
  • What you get: HTML or PDF. The PDF path is the one worth using — you get a file you can email, keep, or take to a print shop.
  • Best for: Producing a file rather than a print job. If you want a PDF of a deck to hand to a study group, this is the cleanest of the three.
  • Watch out: It is an exporter, so it behaves like Anki's export flow rather than a print flow. Check the selection you are exporting before you run it.

Print Selected Cards — add-on code 538768728

  • How it works: Open Anki, select the specific cards you want in the Browser (or choose to export by deck or by tag), then press Shift + P and pick what to export.
  • What you get: A saved file of exactly the cards you selected.
  • Best for: Printing a subset — the 40 cards you keep failing, everything tagged "exam-2", one lecture out of a 900-card deck.
  • Watch out: The selection is the whole point here. If you press Shift + P with nothing meaningful selected you will get a document you did not want.

Which one should you pick?

If you want cards on paper this afternoon and do not care how they are arranged, install Basic Printing Support — it generates a web page and hands it to your browser, and your browser already knows how to print and how to save a PDF. If you care about layout — how many cards land on a page, whether answers print on the back or on a separate sheet — install Extended Printing Support, which puts a settings screen in front of you before it generates anything. If what you actually want is a PDF file rather than a print job, use Papercards, because PDF is one of its native outputs. And if you only need part of a deck, Print Selected Cards is the one built for that: select in the Browser or filter by tag, press Shift + P, done.

Method 5: print Anki flashcards with no add-on at all

Add-ons carry a maintenance risk (see below), and some people simply do not want extra code in their Anki install. There is a route that uses nothing but Anki itself.

  1. Open Anki and choose File > Export.
  2. Select Notes in Plain Text.
  3. Anki writes each note to a text file with the fields separated by tabs. Open that file in a spreadsheet — the tabs become columns, so your question column and your answer column land side by side automatically.
  4. Strip the HTML. The manual is explicit that the text is exported with its HTML formatting embedded, so you will see tags like <b> and <br> in the cells. A find-and-replace pass, or a formula that removes anything between angle brackets, clears them.
  5. Lay it out and print. Two columns for a study sheet, or a table with the question column wide and the answer column narrow if you want to fold the page and self-test.

This is slower than an add-on and it will not reproduce your card templates. What it will do is survive every Anki update forever, which is not nothing.

The trap: your cards are web pages, and web pages print badly

This is the part that catches people out, and it is worth understanding before you print 300 cards. Anki renders every card from HTML and CSS — the same technology a web page uses. That is why cards can have coloured backgrounds, custom fonts, image occlusion masks, cloze highlighting and conditional fields. It is also why a card that looks perfect on screen can come out of a printer as a wall of undifferentiated text, or with images cropped, or with three quarters of a page left blank.

The rule of thumb from people who have actually done this: simple cards print fine, heavily designed cards do not. If your printed flashcards look broken, the problem is almost never the add-on and almost never the printer — it is the card template. Two practical responses:

One more warning worth reading: add-ons break

Anki’s own documentation is blunt about this. Add-ons use and modify arbitrary parts of Anki’s codebase, so updating Anki can break compatibility with older add-ons — and if you depend on one, the manual’s advice is that you may need to keep using an older Anki version until the add-on gets updated. Most AnkiWeb add-on pages carry a Contact Author button for precisely this situation.

In practice this means: if printing is a once-a-semester thing, use an add-on and do not think about it. If printing is part of how you study every week, know the plain-text export route as a fallback so an Anki update never leaves you stuck.

Printing is usually a symptom of a different problem

It is worth naming the reason people search this in the first place. Almost nobody wants paper for its own sake. They want to study away from a screen, or hand a deck to a study partner, or revise somewhere a laptop is impractical, or they have hit the wall where their deck has grown faster than their ability to keep up with it and paper feels like a reset.

If that last one is you, printing will not fix it. The bottleneck in flashcard study is almost never the medium — it is the cost of making the cards in the first place, which is the single most common reason Anki decks get abandoned. Making cards by hand from a lecture PDF can take hours before you review a single one, and a deck you never finished building is not a deck you will print either.

If card creation is the real bottleneck: StudyLoop takes your notes or a PDF and writes the flashcards for you, then schedules them with spaced repetition built in — so the deck exists before your motivation runs out. Free for 3 decks, no card needed. Make your first deck free, or read how automatic note-to-flashcard generation actually works.

Frequently asked questions

Can you print flashcards from Anki?

Yes, but not with a Print command — Anki has no built-in print feature. You print Anki flashcards either by installing a printing add-on (Basic Printing Support, Extended Printing Support, Papercards, or Print Selected Cards), or by exporting your notes as plain text from File > Export and printing that file from a word processor or spreadsheet.

Does Anki have a built-in print button?

No. Anki's File menu offers Export, not Print. The documented export formats are Notes in Plain Text, an Anki Deck Package (.apkg), and an Anki Collection Package (.colpkg). None of those is a print job, which is why every printing route goes through either an add-on or an intermediate file.

How do I install an Anki printing add-on?

In Anki, choose Tools > Add-ons, click Get Add-ons, and paste the add-on's numeric code. Basic Printing Support is 1025789669, Extended Printing Support is 1744020821, Papercards is 2042118948, and Print Selected Cards is 538768728. Restart Anki after installing.

Why do my printed Anki cards look broken?

Because Anki cards are built from HTML and CSS, the same way a web page is. Heavily styled cards — custom fonts, coloured backgrounds, image occlusion, cloze styling, JavaScript — frequently do not survive being rendered to paper. Simple text cards print fine. If your printout looks wrong, print one card first and simplify the card template rather than fighting the printer.

Can I print Anki cards without installing an add-on?

Yes. Use File > Export and choose Notes in Plain Text. Anki writes each note to a text file with the fields separated by tabs, so you can open it in a spreadsheet or word processor, lay it out in two columns, and print from there. Note that the exported text keeps its HTML formatting embedded, so you will see tags like <b> in the file and will want to strip them before printing.

Will a printing add-on keep working after I update Anki?

Not guaranteed. Anki's own manual warns that add-ons modify arbitrary parts of Anki's codebase, so updating Anki can break compatibility with older add-ons — and that if you depend on an add-on you may need to stay on an older Anki version until the author updates it. Most add-on pages on AnkiWeb have a Contact Author button for exactly this situation.

What is the best way to print a whole deck as a PDF?

Papercards, because saving to PDF is one of its native outputs. The alternative is Basic Printing Support, which generates an HTML page and hands it to your browser — and every modern browser can Save as PDF from its own print dialog. Both get you a PDF; Papercards gets you there in fewer steps.

Sources

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