As the question is specifically about alternative tools to get data from PDF as XML so you may be interested to take a look at the commercial tool "ByteScout PDF Extractor SDK" that is capable of doing exactly this: extract text from PDF as XML along with the positioning data (x,y) and font information:
Text in the source PDF:
Products | Units | Price
Output XML:
Products
Units
Price
P.S.: additionally it also breaks the text into a table based structure.
Disclosure: I work for ByteScout
