I have been in the past; currently I consult part time, so that's both (a) fully burdened, and (b) not the rate I'd choose if I still wanted 1'800 hours/year.

Chop it down by a factor of 2-4, and the question still remains: is $250 significant compared to the amount of work you're going to have to do to be competitive in the PDF-document processing space?

(for quick hacks, reverse engineering is good enough. you only need the standard once you're processing enough client documents that you need to know all about the long tail of possible but unlikely constructs your code may encounter, after all)