The following article gives a good overview over what you can do with PDF files (without using the expensive Adobe Acrobat):

http://www.labnol.org/software/adobe-pdf-guide-tutorial/6296/
good find
Thanks, some of that will come in handy at work.
But I notice no good way to convert from PDF.
PDF was designed as an output format. It will probably never be easy to manipulate.
"Good" is a matter of conjecture Jon, the article suggests that "You can upload the PDF document to Zamzar and convert it any formats like doc, html, png, txt or rtf (rich text format). Alternatively, you can convert PDF to HTML using Gmail."

I have used ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0, ABC Amber PDF Converter, Paperport, and several other packages over the years. There is not one solution for all cases and the correct choice depends on the specific PDF in question, the tools on your computer, what tools are currently available for free, what you tools you can get in a functioning trial copy, and how much money you are willing to spend on new tools.

While I am not the biggest fan of PDF for ebooks, PDFs have their place and I have created PDF files for the Sony Reader where I felt they were the best option.
too many of the options proposed in the article involve the uploading of your document to some server.
Call me paranoid, but I don't like at all this kind of "services" - I want my documents to stay on <my> server.
Apart from that, under linux (which is not mentioned at all in the article) software exists to do practically any kind of conversion you need.



alessandro
Really? I did search for one and have found no Linux program at all that tries to convert from PDF to floating text with attributes and with paragraph recognition. The only program that generates useful output I could find is PdfGrabber, but I am still interested in a better solution.
I have a few scanned google books in pdf that I'm having a hard time converting to text, even following advice from the article. Has anyone done this successfully? I've tried:
-Zamzar (returns an unopenable doc file)
-Google mail (doesn't display pdf as html)
-Pdf2Word program
You can upload the scanned PDF files to a public web server, link those files from web page and then wait for google bots to index those PDF. See complete instructions.