pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better

pdftotext can produce garbled output, especially from two-column PDFs.* Depending on what you need, scripting Adobe Reader may be an option as it does a better job. * I did a sizeable data mining project a while ago which required converting a lot of scientific papers to plain text. pdftotext didn't work well on a lot of them, so I had a script sending click events to Adobe Reader running overnight.