> for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this. Not really, or at least not all that specialized. You need: a: a pdf-to-raster-image conve

> for PDF you need highly specialized software packages to do this. Not really, or at least not all that specialized. You need: a: a pdf-to-raster-image converter (ie any working PDF viewer, plus maybe the X server it talks to) b: a reasonably decent OCR system capable of scanning tables (definitely nontrivial, but hardly "highly specialized" since things other than PDFs display data in tables).