pstotext is a program that works with Ghostscript to extract plain text from PostScript and PDF files.

pstotext works by sending a library, followed by the PostScript file, to the Ghostscript interpreter. The library intercepts the text rendering operators and sends information about the text back to pstotext. This information includes character metrics and encoding vectors, so in most situations we're able to reconstruct the plain text (converted to ISO Latin 1 encoding), with correct word breaks and good guesses about line breaks. It even works for rotated text!

 Usage: pstotext [option|file]...
Options:
  -cork            assume Cork encoding for dvips output
  -landscape       rotate 270 degrees
  -landscapeOther  rotate 90 degrees
  -portrait        don't rotate (default)
  -bboxes          output one word per line with bounding box
  -debug           show Ghostscript output and error messages
  -gs "command"    Ghostscript command
  -                read from stdin (default if no files specified)
  -output file     output results to "file" (default is stdout)