> The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard What exactly do you base that on? Have you written any PDF or postscript utilities?

> The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard What exactly do you base that on? Have you written any PDF or postscript utilities? Images are easily located in rather discrete chunks, and they are conveniently stored in standard formats like JPEG. Preserving the layout of text output takes a bit of work, but otherwise extracting text and images is just about a necessary first early step in writing any PDF viewer. And I do believe even very early PDF viewers allowed arbitrary copy/paste of text.