Recently, I found some documents exported as SWF. It would be certainly more convenient for me if I could read these documents in my PDF reader. So I needed a utility to convert content from Adobe Flash to PDF. For this reason, I’ve written a small Python program that utilizes the SWFTools in order to parse the SWF and exports output in SVG and PDF file formats.
The utility is still very experimental and will certainly need some tuning in order to produce perfect output. In order to use it, you need, of course, Python and, also, the SWFTools. You need to add a few lines in lib/Makefile of SWFTools in order to create a dynamic library for Python:
librfxswf.$(SLEXT): $(rfxswf_objects) rfxswf.$(O) drawer.$(O) $(lame_in_source) $(h263_objects) $(as12compiler_in_source) $(as3compiler_objects) libbase$(A)
$(L) -g -shared -o $@ $^ -lz
The utility is split into two parts. The swf_lib.py uses Python ctypes in order to communicate with the dynamic library and the swf_to_pdf.py is the main engine that performs the transformation. Currently shapes and text are supported. Eventually, more stuff could be implemented. It should be possible to transform a Flash application completely into an equivalent HTML5 application. I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader!
You can see here an example of the utility:
- The original PDF.
- The SWF produced by SWFTools’ pdf2swf tool.
- The output SVG produced by the SWF to SVG/PDF utility presented here.
- The output PDF produced by the SWF to SVG/PDF utility presented here.
