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pdftotext filename

Or there's the related PDFTOHTML if you prefer that for your access method.

xpdf, which is GPL'd, comes with pdftotext, a simple utility to (you guessed it) convert pdf files to text.

You should also be able to use xpdf if you don't want to deal with installing Acrobat.
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

Unisys has contacted several open source package maintainers about the used of LZW. They have claimed that the patent not only covers compression but also decompression. As a result, authors of software that may only do decompression of LZW get harrassed by Unisys for expensive licensing or loose the ability to do decompression of LZW information. One popular case of this is the Xpdf package being forced into doing LZW indirectly. How exactly does gzip handle decompression of ".Z" files in a way that avoids the wording of the patent?

Ghostview or gv should be available. Also try xpdf, at http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf. It's GPL, and it works pretty well.

xpdf, the free alternative to acrobat reader
comes with a PDF to ASCII converter. You can
find it here:


http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/
.

Another tool is pstotext which can be found here:


http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/pstotext.html
.

Now that they consider LZW profitable, they continue to make their rounds on enforcing their LZW patent ( Patent #4,558,302). But they didn't always consider it profitable enough to actually enforce. They sat silent as CompServe promoted the GIF 87 standard as an open and free graphic file format. Two years later when the open & free format was revised to GIF 89 and GIF 89a, Unisys continued to sit silent. It wasn't until 1993 when GIF had taken on popularity due to it's free nature that Unisys choose to actually take action. If they had taken action back before 1990 instead of 6 years after GIF's original introduction then programmers/users looking for a free file format would not have accepted GIF/LZW and would have looked for an alternative. By remaining blind to the most popular computer image format in BBS history, Unisys ensured an entrenched critical mass of patent infrigement to tax. If Unisys had available to it an even dirtier and non-professional method of making a buck, I'm glad I haven't heard about it.

The League for Programming Freedom has some good information on the GIF Controversy. And, since there is always two sides to every story, Unisys has written their take on the issue. This document explains their stand on requiring licensing from EVERYONE including for what they refered to as "so-called 'freeware.'" They also have a special email address set aside to answer licensing questions. You may wish to email them to find out more on why they refuse to provide a license which is fair to the "so-called 'freeware'" software developer.

Fortantly, this form of Unisys terror will come to an end. Libungif provides a work-around while resulting in files larger than a xpm or bmp containing the same image. The Unisys action also hopefully will help further promote the use of PNG. Most users of web browsers that don't support PNG have much more to worry about than PNGs showing up as a broken image--the public keys for the SSL Certificate Authorites in non-PNG supporting web browsers have either expired or will expire shortly. Since SSL doesn't cleanly handle expired CA entries, users of non-PNG supporting web browsers may be open to a masqurade attack. And to bring things to an end once and for all, 20 years from the filing date of June 20, 1983, US Patent 4,558,302 expires. I suggest that Slashdot mark June 20, 2003 on it's calendar for a party!

Btw, along the topic of math that has been around for "years and years," LZW doesn't become available in the US until Dec 2002. For those that haven't been following the LZW issues, UniSys holds the patent to LZW and silently watched CompuServe declair LZW part of the GIF87, GIF89 and GIF89a open standards. They also waited silently for LZW to become widely used as part of the PostScript standard. After YEARS of neglecting to enforce the patent they decided to then enforce payment requirements to use the GIF, TIFF/LZW, PostScript (and PDF) standards. Their targets have included GNU software contributor Derek B. Noonburg for xpdf and Linux friendly company Corel Corp.