For collecting words from pdf documents, you can use the ps2ascii utility which comes with ghostscript. It executes the document with ghostscript, using a special device that outputs only ascii text. As ghostscript can handle pdfs too, ps2ascii works fine on them (although I did have some compatibility problems with some pdfs, depending on the generating program and the version of ghostscript).

This doesn't work for word documents of course.

In reply to Re^3: Perl variant of linux tool strings by ambrus
in thread Perl variant of linux tool strings by jeanluca

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