PDF to text convertor

There's xpdf which includes the pdftotext binary.

Pdftotext converts Portable Document Format (PDF) files to plain text.

On Linux there's a installer available. It seems that it also comes in the poppler-utils package. On OS X you could install it using Homebrew (install that first) and then use

brew install homebrew/x11/xpdf

which will download the source files and compile it for OS X. After that, just use it like:

pdftotext your_pdf_file.pdf

which will generate a plain text file. There are a couple of options as well, check out man pdftotext for more details.

An alternative is poppler, in OSX:

brew install poppler

in Debian and friends

apt-get install poppler-utils