Hi: I use a package called pstotext which requires ghostscript to work. To be honest, I'm not sure how much ghostscript does and how much the pstotext program adds to it, but hey I don't ask questions - it works. I also installed a package called gs-pdfencrypt (or something similar) which adds capability to ghostscript to read encrypted PDF files. I don't know what distro you run, but installing these under debian is a piece of cake. Just install pstotext and its requirements should install by themselves. The encryption stuff is another package, let me know if you can't find it. Geoff.
