Pro feature
Turn an article URL into a carousel
Paste a link to a published article. Cards fetches the page, pulls out the readable body, converts it to Markdown, and runs Smart split over the result. You choose whether to replace your draft or add the new slides to it, then trim the deck down to a post.
Import a link
01
Open the editor
Sign in with a Pro plan or an active trial. Import from URL is a Pro feature, so free accounts see the upgrade panel instead of the form.
02
Click the link button
It sits at the right end of the toolbar above the text box, beside the image button. Clicking it opens a window for the link. The blank preview shows the same Import from a link button.
03
Paste the URL and import
Enter the full address, starting with http or https. Press Enter or click Import. Cards reads the article and tells you how many cards it found. Your draft stays as it is until you choose what to do next.
Cards stages the article before it touches your draft. Choose Replace current draft to swap your cards for the article, or Add after current cards to keep what you have and place the new slides after it. Nothing changes until you pick one, so a failed fetch leaves your text alone.
What Smart split does with the article
Smart split reads the Markdown structure and gives each block its own slide. Nothing is reworded and nothing is summarized. The article’s own shape decides the deck.
Paragraphs that sit next to each other are packed into as many text slides as they need, measured against the canvas size and type size you have set. Every other block stands alone. If you later merge a heading into a slide that also holds prose, that slide reads as body text.
What the import leaves behind
Cards keeps the text the card renderer can draw and drops the rest.
- Images, video, embeds, and forms are removed. Add your own backgrounds in the editor.
- Links keep their text and lose the address, so no bracket syntax shows up on a slide.
- Table cells become plain lines, one row per line.
- Headings below the third level are flattened to level three.
- Articles longer than 100,000 characters are cut at a paragraph or word boundary.
Pages that will not import
Import expects an HTML page with an article on it. The editor shows the reason when a link is refused.
- PDFs and other non-HTML files. Only
httpandhttpsHTML pages are fetched. - Anything behind a login or a paywall. Cards fetches the page as an anonymous visitor and sends none of your cookies.
- Pages that build their body in the browser. Cards reads the HTML the server returns and runs no scripts.
- Pages with no article to find, such as a home page or a tag index.
- Pages over 3 MB, pages that take more than ten seconds to answer, and pages behind more than three redirects.
When a link is refused, copy the article text and paste it into the text box, then press Smart split. The planner is the same one the import feeds.
Edit the draft into a post
Smart split writes its slide breaks into the text box as --- lines and switches the draft to manual splitting, so the boundaries stay where the import put them. Dropping a slide means deleting the block between two separators. Splitting one further means adding another separator line.
A long read imports as far more slides than a carousel can use, so work downward: keep the slides that carry an argument or a number, delete the rest. Ten slides is already a long carousel. Deciding what to cut is covered in repurpose a blog post into a carousel.
To change how a slide is drawn, click it in the preview and pick from Slide type. Auto reads the Markdown, and any other choice pins the slide to that type until you set it back.
Credit the source
Import copies someone’s published words verbatim. If the article is yours, that is the point. If it is not, quote a passage rather than the whole piece, name the author on the slide or in the caption, and check the site’s terms before you post.