Extracting text from PDF

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Sun, Feb 24, 2008 at 8:47 AM, Richard Gaskin
<ambassador at fourthworld.com> wrote:
> Kay C Lan wrote:
>  > use the launch command to force a pdf to open with TextEdit
>  >
>  > use do to run this AppleScript:
>  >
>  > tell application "TextEdit"
>  >     set tText to the text of document 1
>  > end tell
>
>  Maybe this is another Leopard thang, I dunno, I haven't set up my test
>  stack for this yet, but in Tiger I can't get Text Edit to open a PDF in
>  any meaningful way; that is, it just shows the raw PDF data but doesn't
>  render it.
>
>  So my question is whether TextEdit renders PDFs normally in Leopard, or
>  if the behavior is the same as under Tiger then how does the "launch"
>  command differ from dropping a file on the app's Dock icon?
>

Well I am using Leopard and I get the same as Richard, just a whole
heap of binary garbage. What's the trick Kay?

Sarah