SWF to PDF conversion

Yes; see

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1106098/parse-annotations-from-a-pdf

and maybe

https://github.com/measuresforjustice/textricator

(thought we should take this question out of the unanswerd queue)

pdftk is able to cut out a fixed set of pages efficiently. With a bit of scripting glue, this does what I want:

number=$(pdfinfo -- "$file" 2> /dev/null | awk '$1 == "Pages:" {print $2}')
count=$((number / pagesper))
filename=${file%.pdf}

counter=0
while [ "$count" -gt "$counter" ]; do 
  start=$((counter*pagesper + 1));
  end=$((start + pagesper - 1));

  counterstring=$(printf %04d "$counter")
  pdftk "$file" cat "${start}-${end}" output "${filename}_${counterstring}.pdf"

  counter=$((counter + 1))
done

This assumes that you have the number of pages per chunk in $pagesper and the filename of the source PDF in $file.

If you have acroread installed, you can also use

acroread -size a4 -start "$start" -end "$end" -pairs "$file" "${filename}_${counterstring}.ps"

acroread offers the option -toPostScript which may be useful.