pyPDF works fine (assuming that you're working with well-formed PDFs). If all you want is the text (with spaces), you can just do:
import pyPdf
pdf = pyPdf.PdfFileReader(open(filename, "rb"))
for page in pdf.pages:
print page.extractText()
You can also easily get access to the metadata, image data, and so forth.
A comment in the extractText code notes:
Locate all text drawing commands, in
the order they are provided in the
content stream, and extract the text.
This works well for some PDF files,
but poorly for others, depending on
the generator used. This will be
refined in the future. Do not rely on
the order of text coming out of this
function, as it will change if this
function is made more sophisticated.
Whether or not this is a problem depends on what you're doing with the text (e.g. if the order doesn't matter, it's fine, or if the generator adds text to the stream in the order it will be displayed, it's fine). I have pyPdf extraction code in daily use, without any problems.
