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On a related note: I'm looking for a command line utility (*nix) to go the other way. Any recommendations for a tool which extracts text from a PDF?

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pdftotext and pdftohtml are shipped with poppler, the de-facto PDF implementation on Linux systems today.

pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better job.

* I did a sizeable data mining project a while ago which required converting a lot of scientific papers to plain text. pdftotext didn't work well on a lot of them, so I had a script sending click events to Adobe Reader running overnight.

While still a very new project, pdfsplit (http://dmwit.com/pdfsplit/) may be worth a try.

Thanks for all the links, I'll check those out.

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