You could use innards of some open source PDF viewer (most of them are written in C++). I managed to get away just with using command line PDF->TXT tool that c

You could use innards of some open source PDF viewer (most of them are written in C++). I managed to get away just with using command line PDF->TXT tool that came with Xpdf [1]. Also MuPDF is awesome [2]. Its bare bones demo PDF viewer replaced Foxit as my default PDF handler. If you have some more serious budget, there is also PDFlib TET [3], a nice commercial solution with bindings for many languages (C, C++, Python, Ruby, Perl, .NET, and many others). ----- [1] http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html [2] http://ccxvii.net/fitz http://ccxvii.net/fitz [3] http://www.pdflib.com/en/products/tet/ http://www.pdflib.com/en/products/tet/