Click on Files & Folders in the leftmost column, then drag Ask For Finder Items from the second column to the larger section at the right of the Automator window. On the first screen that displays, choose to make a Workflow. Open Automator, which is in your Applications folder. You can use Automator to create a workflow that can extract text from PDFs and save it as a text or RTF document. The first method is the cheapest, and uses a tool that is part of OS X: Automator.
There are ways, however, that you can convert a PDF to formatted text. You’ll often see odd breaks, or no breaks at all, and styles will be lost. While you can select text in a PDF, chances are that this text will be seriously munged. You may need to copy a paragraph, a page or more, and edit it in a Microsoft Word document, or in another word processor or text editor. While the PDF file format is a great tool for sharing documents while retaining their formatting and for assuring that documents aren’t changed (contracts, for instance), sometimes you need to use the text from a PDF.
