No, but it will keep you computers RAM free for other tasks. JB's rider needs to swap because of limit of RAM if it doesn't you probably loose your work while working on it.
Another way to limit this is to use Linux's control groups. This is especially useful if you want to limit a process's (or group of processes') allocation of physical memory distinctly from virtual memory. For example:
will create a control group named myGroup, cap the set of processes run under myGroup up to 500 MB of physical memory with memory.limit_in_bytes and up to 5000 MB of physical and swap memory together with memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes. More info about these options can be found here: 3.7. memory Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 | Red Hat Customer Portal
To run a process under the control group:
cgexec -g memory:myGroup pdftoppm
Note that on a modern Ubuntu distribution this example requires installing the cgroup-bin package and editing /etc/default/grub to change GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to:
Looks good in my eye, but you might wait for a second opinion for safty, as I have no intention to test on my machine. I still think it's a bad idea to mess the OS memory allocations system, but that's just my opinion.
swap - How do I configure swappiness? - Ask Ubuntu
A swappiness setting of zero means that the disk will be avoided unless absolutely necessary (you run out of memory), while a swappiness setting of 100 means that programs will be swapped to disk almost instantly. -In topic