Yet another (but similar) way to do it: use pdftohtml's XML output mode, and parse that. This has the advantage that it stores position information for the text, and it writes the strings out in the order they were rendered on the page. This can be quite helpful.

pdftohtml uses the internals of xpdf to do the work. xpdf comes with the pdftotext tool, which might do all you need.

If none of the above works -- and some PDFs do very weird things with font encoding -- if you install the DjVuLibre application, and run your PDF through the Any2DjVu converter, it will do real OCR, the text of which you can extract with the djvused tool.

All this is moot, of course, if the terms of use of the original file forbid anything other than reading the document on the screen. Many financial institutions use PDF for its "read only" (for the casual user) nature.

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bowling trophy thieves, die!