The Ansys 5.6 Theory Manual was supplied on CD in the form of a 64 Mb PDF file! This very large file was very slow loading on some machines and did not have a hyperlinked table of contents or index to make it easy to navigate through the document. To alleviate these problems, I split the manual into 175 smaller, more manageable PDF files.
It would have taken a very boring eternity to manually split apart the theory manual using the Adobe Acrobat GUI, so I wrote some APL functions to do the work for me. Once the manual was split apart another function was written to create an HTML index listing all the parts.
The manual was divided up by chapter first and then chapter 14, "Element Library" was divided up by element name.
The APL function "split-chap" was used to create the Bourne shell script "split-chap.sh". The shell script, was then run to parse the manual by chapter. Likewise the APL function "split-elem" was used to create "split-elem.sh" which parsed up chapter 14.
I didn't have any programmable tools that would work directly with PDF files, so I had to convert the theory manual to postscript format first. Then I could write my functions to use the postscript tools, "PSUtils" that come with most Linux distributions such as SuSE and Peanut. Once all the postscript files were written to disk, I converted them back to PDF format in batch mode.