TextLightning works...sometimes. If you've got a PDF with simple formatting TextLightning will churn out a respectable rtf file. Feed TextLightning a slightly complex PDF file, and you get a useless rtf document filled with word fragments and line breaks every few words. But it still beats manually copying and pasting text from PDF files, right?

Oh, but imagine my surprise when I downloaded the latest version of Adobe Reader (v7.0.7), opened a complex PDF document on which TextLightning had choked, and saw a curious item in the File menu: "Save As Text..." In a few minutes I'd converted all of my most complex PDF files to txt files, and the results were PERFECT!

Adobe Reader does this for FREE, and it does it well.