Today my brother needed a way for copying text from a PDF file and the first strange thing was that no Windows viewer allowed that.
So after having searched something on Google and have found the most stupid comments and suggestions read in my life (for example an idiot suggested to do a screenshot of the screen ah ah ah) I finally decided to switch on the "converting" way.
The open source project of XPDF naturally implements everything so using pdftotext is possible to dump all the text data of a PDF file in some milliseconds (for the Windows lazy boys just drag your PDF over pdftotext.exe):
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
Nice job except that this program doesn't allow to bypass the DRM restrictions: I mean, it CAN but doesn't allow since his author lives in USA and so seems he must respect this rule.
So I have written a quick patch for bypassing the restriction allowing the dumping of any PDF file with or without DRM which can be applied to pdftotext, pdftops and pdfimages:
http://aluigi.org/mytoolz.htm#lpatch
http://mirror.aluigi.org/patches/pdftotext_nodrm.lpatch
It's just a one-byte modification.
Hope it helps.
