[mytddu]

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

[IngoBlechschmid]

Sure, the Linux tool "pdftotext" works just fine for this. Two small caveats: ligatures get converted to proper Unicode ligatures and not their ASCII fallback (as one might want or expect) and of course complex mathematical formulas are rendered badly.

[mytddu]

I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.

[nitrogen]

Pdf2txt wasn't helpful?

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...

[based2]

https://pdfbox.apache.org/