With a little supersearching, you could have found taht pdftotext is part of the xpdf package.

I've used it since late 2002, and the only problems I've had arise from one particular organization (a government agency, go figure) making changes that were not obvious, and doing odd, possibly nonstandard things with their formatting.

pdftotext works well, but you have to watch your source of the data, particularly if that source isn't trustworthy. Although, come to think of it, that's true in all areas of my job.