Drop in your lecture slides, PPTs, scanned notes, lecture videos and the course handout (CIF / syllabus). Say "make notes for my midterm" and Claude builds a printable A4 study-guide PDF organised the way your course file organises the syllabus. It includes figures cropped from your own slides and video frames, worked numericals, a formula sheet, traps, and a question bank with model answers.
| Mode (picked from your words) | Trigger phrases | Output |
|---|---|---|
| quiz | "quiz", "MCQ", "questions to mug up" | Quick-revision one-liners, formula sheet, 150-300 rapid-fire Q-to-A rows, 50+ MCQs with an answer key |
| midterm | "midterm", "mid-sem", "viva" | Full explanations, derivation chains, solved numericals, long-answer bank with model answers |
| endterm | "endterm", "final" | Midterm style plus a merge of every earlier guide for the course into one PDF |
| notes | "notes", "explain", "summary" | Explanations, figures, formula sheet, traps |
| cheatsheet | "last night", "formula sheet" | 2-4 pages: formulas, numbers, traps, one-liners |
Every guide has a cover (decks covered, how to use it, what is missing from the syllabus, box legend) and unit sections numbered with slide ranges, such as II-B.4 Coherence time (slides 14-19). It uses colour-coded boxes:
- Exam focus (blue): the 1-3 facts most likely to be asked.
- Trap (red): commonly confused pairs, sign and factor mistakes.
- Worked example (green): fully solved, with units.
- Extra (grey): anything not taught in your slides, so you know what came from outside.
If you mention the exam time ("tomorrow", "in 6 hours"), it adds a revision plan to the cover.
| Need | Why | Install |
|---|---|---|
| Claude Code | Runs the skill | n/a |
| Python 3.9+ | Runs studytool.py |
n/a |
pymupdf, pillow |
Read PDFs, crop figures | pip install pymupdf pillow |
| Edge, Chrome or Chromium | Prints the HTML to PDF | usually already installed |
| Internet during build | Math is rendered by KaTeX from a CDN | n/a |
| Source | Need | Install |
|---|---|---|
.pptx slides |
PowerPoint (Windows) or LibreOffice | winget install TheDocumentFoundation.LibreOffice |
| Lecture videos | ffmpeg |
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg / brew install ffmpeg |
| Video transcripts | faster-whisper |
pip install faster-whisper |
| GPU transcription (NVIDIA) | CUDA libraries | pip install nvidia-cublas-cu12 "nvidia-cudnn-cu12>=9,<10" |
| Scanned / handwritten notes | Tesseract | winget install UB-Mannheim.TesseractOCR / brew install tesseract |
The toolkit looks for browsers and tools in the usual Windows, macOS and Linux locations, but it has been used mostly on Windows.
git clone https://github.com/Shiviansh/study-guide-skill.git
cp -r study-guide-skill/study-guide ~/.claude/skills/ # Windows: copy into %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\
pip install pymupdf pillowRestart Claude Code, then ask:
"using my study guide skill make me perfect notes for my mid term" (attach or point to your PDFs / PPTs / videos / CIF)
Optional: add a line to your global CLAUDE.md pointing at a course library folder (for example Documents\StudyGuides\<COURSE>\). Every guide's sources are then kept for the endterm merge.
- Pick the mode from your words.
- Read the course file first. It fixes the unit and topic order and the exam's scope.
- Read every page of every source. Videos are transcribed and frame-grabbed.
- Crop figures from the real slides and frames (
scanfinds figure boxes,cropcuts them). - Write HTML from
assets/template.html(KaTeX, boxes, tables). - Build with
studytool.py build. It reports any unrendered math, and Claude then views the preview PNGs before delivering. - Save the PDF, HTML fragments and images to a per-course library for later merging.
| Command | Does |
|---|---|
scan |
Finds figure boxes on slide pages, filtering repeated background art |
crop |
Crops a PDF region or video-frame region at 3x zoom |
build |
Inlines images, prints to PDF via headless Chromium, reports unrendered math, saves previews |
merge |
Concatenates PDFs (endterm fallback) |
pptx2pdf |
PowerPoint / LibreOffice conversion |
transcribe |
faster-whisper speech-to-text, automatic GPU use, optional hints file for jargon |
frames |
Scene-change frame capture (plus one every 90 s for board work), de-duplicated |
sheets |
4x4 timestamped contact sheets so a whole lecture can be skimmed in a few images |
ocr |
Tesseract OCR for scans |
This compares design choices, not benchmarks.
| Generic summariser | study-guide | |
|---|---|---|
| Structure | Whatever the model decides | Follows your CIF / syllabus unit by unit, tagged with slide ranges and video timestamps |
| Diagrams | Redrawn, missing, or described in words | Cropped from your professor's own slides and video frames, captioned with the source |
| Videos | Ignored, or text only | Transcribed, scene-change frames extracted, overview sheets for quick review |
| Gaps | Silently incomplete | The cover lists syllabus topics with no material provided |
| Outside knowledge | Mixed in unlabelled | Confined to Extra boxes, so you know what wasn't taught |
| Errors in the source | Copied | Slide typos corrected with a note; lecturer mistakes flagged in Trap boxes |
| Numericals | Often unchecked | Every worked example re-verified, solved with units |
| Exam fit | One-size summary | Five modes, a model-answer question bank, a revision plan if the exam time is known |
| Questions | May invent "exact exam questions" | Banks are labelled "likely questions built from the slides", never a leaked paper |
| Output | Chat text | Printable A4 PDF, checked for broken math at build time |
| Reuse | One-off | Per-course library of sources, so the endterm merge rebuilds one unified guide |
| Scope | Covers everything given | Honours the exam's stated scope (for example midterm = Units I-II only) |
- Quality depends on the material you provide. Gaps are flagged, not filled silently.
- Handwriting OCR is weak, so scans are also viewed visually.
- Math rendering needs internet (KaTeX CDN).
- Lecture videos behind a college login must be downloaded by you. The skill never handles your credentials.
- It helps you study. It does not replace attending lectures, and generated answers should be checked against your own notes.
study-guide/
SKILL.md # workflow + modes (what Claude reads)
assets/template.html # CSS, KaTeX, component snippets
references/ # modes.md, sources.md, style.md
scripts/studytool.py # the toolkit
MIT, see LICENSE.