With the PDFs I'm looking at now ... not so much.

Be aware that there are a lot pdf's out there that consist of images only, instead of "text in pdf format". It may be that this is the case with your files, too. To test: Fire up Acrobat and see if you can select, copy & paste some text. If not, you cannot extract text without using OCR.

caveat: copy & pasting from a document may also be impossible if the usage of the pdf is restricted.