I use 'poppler' or Apache's PDFBox for text extraction from PDF. They both can write HTML or their own XML format. In addition, they keep the absolute positioni

I use 'poppler' or Apache's PDFBox for text extraction from PDF. They both can write HTML or their own XML format. In addition, they keep the absolute positioning of the layout. For XML files, there is XSL-T. A simple run with the default template will give you all strings in the document, if you really want just the paragraph text, you will need to find/create an XSL transform. None of these is ready to go, but very close to it. Epecially in the case of poppler and pdfbox.