Richard -

As I said to another list member off-list, you have to understand that the
PDF format was never intended to be convertible to text.  It's first and
foremost a print file format, so as a result, any and all attempts that have
been made to enable accessibility have necessarily been attempts to
retro-fit something that was never intended on to a perfectly good system.
Converting a PDF file to text is not too far from converting a binary
executable back into understandable, human-readable code.  Anybody who can't
cope with the PDF format directly still has one option and in many cases,
it's probably a better one than a straight conversion of the file into
ASCII...print the document, then scan it using one of the best technologies
you can afford.  The chances are you'll get a better document than is
technically possible to get by means of a simple PDF-to-text conversion.
You can't really criticize a horse because it's not a cow.

--
 Walt Smith - Raleigh, NC
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