While poking around Adobe, I found a service they provide where you e-mail them a PDF document, and they process it (free) and e-mail you BACK a text document that contains all the text from the PDF, in an editable format. Nice idea!

Adobe PDF Conversion by Email Attachment
If the Adobe PDF file is on local media, such as a hard drive, CD-ROM, or internal server, it can be submitted as a MIME attachment to an e-mail message. All converted Adobe PDF documents will be sent back to the sender as MIME attachments. For plain text, mail the attached PDF to pdf2txt@adobe.com. For HTML, mail the attached PDF to pdf2html@adobe.com.

I had a CD cover that I had designed from which I wanted to extract the track titles and timings. Easy enough to drag this document to an e-mail and send it off. I figured that if it came back quickly enough, it would beat the retyping time.

Well, the list of tracks and their timings came back via e-mail. Just like promised.

Well, the F in PDF doesn’t stand for Fast: I e-mailed it on September 9, 2005. It arrived today, October 6, 2005.