I am searching for an open source "pdf to ascii" conversion tool.
Programming language preperrably JAVA but any other will do.
Alternatively a good source for information to write my own. (Not the
1000 pages of the Adobe specification)

Hi xsansara!

I have found an open-source Java library which includes text-extraction from a PDF.

From its homepage:
"Description
PDFBox is a Java PDF Library. This project will allow access to all of
the components in a PDF document.
...
This ships with a utility to take a PDF document and output a text file."

It can be downloaded here:  http://www.pdfbox.org/
More information can be found at its SourceForge page here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78314

Included with the source are the appropriate documentation which
should be all you need to get started.

If you require any clarification or would like some assistance using
this library, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification before
closing and rating this answer, so that I may best help you.

Cheers,
tox-ga

---

Clarification of Answer by tox-ga on 16 Jun 2004 11:02 PDT

Hi,
Just to clarify, the class in here you will want is 
  org.pdfbox.util.PDFTextStripper

--tox

Gee thanks just what I was looking for.

I am not a google answers researcher.

For less than the price of your question, you can get a program
($12.95) to do this:
http://www.thebeatlesforever.com/processtext/abcpdf.html

Open Source: try ImageMagick www.imagemagick.com

Search Criteria: PDF convert
Also personal knowledge.

I'm not enough of a programmer (heck...I'm not a programmer at all!)
to know if this will do the trick or not:

http://rootr.net/man/man/ps2ascii/1
ps2ascii  -  Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to ASCII

but it looked like it came awfully close.  

Let me know if it's on target or not.

pafalafa-ga

www.gnu.org is where id look for open source since it is the largest
opensource community

Point was I didn't want some pdf2ascii Tool. There are enough out
there already but something well documented and open source to put
some of my own stuff inside.  Tox found me right what I needed.