Extracting text from pdf files

Recently found the mupdf package, which is a free pdf-viewer and utility package, at www.mupdf.com.
Binaries can be downloaded for Windows and Linux and looks like the Mac version can be built from source also.

On Ubuntu Linux it can also be installed using the package manager :
sudo apt-get install mupdf-tools

One of the utilities is called pdfdraw. It can render the pages of a pdf file in a few image formats.
The -t command line switch can be used to dump out the text from the pages to the standard output. From there it's simply the matter of redirecting to a file:
pdfdraw -t filename.pdf > filename.txt

Saving/Printing Google Reader stories through PrintFriendly.com

Recently Google Reader added a new feature, 'Send To', that can be configured on the Reader Settings page. 'Send To' lets you pass the original article's URL to a few predefined online sites and services.

Luckily, in addition to the predefined sites, it is also possible to add and configure custom services that you'd like to process the URL with.
One of my favorite pages is PrintFriendly.com, that can print a page or post after stripping away content that is not part of the main article. It can also save the page as a PDF file.
So right away I tried to create an custom 'Send To' item for Google Reader, that lets me forward the article to PrintFriendly for processing.

All you have to do is go to the 'Send To' tab on the Settings page, click on the 'Create a custom link' button at the bottom and enter the following information:

Name : PrintFriendly
URL : http://www.printfriendly.com/print?url=${url}
Icon URL : http://cdn.printfriendly.com/pf-icon.gif

and click save.
After that, when you read an article in the Reader, the Send To list at the bottom will include the PrintFriendly option, in addition to the others you enabled. Clicking it will bring up the PrintFriendly.com page with the article already loaded and cleaned up. You can do further editing before printing or saving to PDF.