Comment Re:vision (Score 1) 61
This has been a solved problem for about 30 years, inside the opensource "xpdf" package secretly lives a standalone tool called "pdftotext"
the use is simple:
pdftotext -layout somefile.pdf
enjoy reading somefile.txt as any other plaintext file. The -layout option is required because there is no requirement in pdf for characters to render in the order they will be read on the page. I personally generate pdf files from bottom to top in postscript because I can make the postscript file look like plaintext at the top with layout code at the bottom. Then ps2pdf from the ghostscript package will create the pdf of my resume, for example. This output pdf is almost impossible for systems that don't use pdftotext -layout to ingest.