We've had good luck with "pdftotext" from poppler/xpdf. The only things that were garbled were intentionally obfuscated. (The files had a mangled character enco

We've had good luck with "pdftotext" from poppler/xpdf. The only things that were garbled were intentionally obfuscated. (The files had a mangled character encoding table that was added to the pdf to prevent copy/paste.) You're also gonna have problems with all-image pdfs (scans) that have low quality OCR results layered on top of them. If you want to decode tables, "pdftotext -layout" is a good starting point. If you need more detail, try "pdftohtml -xml -fullfontname".