With all due respect, if you're looking to extract text and images from documents, there are free and open-source options. DocuHarvest looks like a great servic

With all due respect, if you're looking to extract text and images from documents, there are free and open-source options. DocuHarvest looks like a great service for an end-user, but if you're a programmer, I recommend you take a peek at Docsplit, an open-source project of ours that extracts text, images, and metadata from documents, including non-pdfs. http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/ http://documentcloud.github.com/docsplit/ Or the Python port: http://github.com/anderser/pydocsplit http://github.com/anderser/pydocsplit It's thin wrapper on top of a number of excellent open-source projects that do the real work: * OpenOffice / JODConverter, to convert ".doc", ".ppt", ".xls", ".rtf" into PDFs. * GraphicsMagick and Ghostscript, to render PDFs into images of any size and format. * Apache PDFBox, to extract UTF8 plain text and metadata from PDFs. We're thinking about adding Tesseract-based OCR into the text-extraction, but it's still a little difficult to figure out how to package that up portably for multiple platforms. Full Disclosure: Docsplit is part of DocumentCloud, a non-profit project funded by the Knight Foundation to help journalists work with primary source documents.