Yup, this is the way to go. Done it several times, with good success. Multiple column text (like in newspapers or brochures) sucks, though, as you can't tell where the columns start. For this, a little manual work with ghostview might be needed (ghostview can copy and paste text from PDFs after it has extracted the text, e.g., after a search command).

Christian Lemburg
Brainbench MVP for Perl
http://www.brainbench.com