Ubuntu Linux

This article presents 2 tools for converting PDF documents to editable text on Linux, using a graphical tool (Calibre) and a command line tool (pdftotext). 

The GUI tool used to convert PDF to text presented in this article is Calibre. This application can also perform file conversions from the command line, but since that requires installing the full GUI, the article mentions a different, specialized command line tool for converting PDF to text called... pdftotext.

pdftotext has many options, including the ability to specify the page range to convert, maintain the original physical layout of the text as best as possible, set line endings (unix, dos or mac), and even work with password-protected PDF files.