After quite some Googling of "perl extract text from pdf" and a host of related permutations, I've concluded that good old pdftotext (part of XPDF) is the best way to go when all you want is a plain text string out of a PDF file. (Including a Perlmonks post by the author of perl module CAM saying so)

BUT - how, exactly, do I use it in my perl script?

That is, if I have foo.pdf in a directory on my server, and my own csript extract_text_from_pdf.pl in my cgi-bin, what is the correct syntax for

$content = some-pdftotext-command('foo.pdf');
<code>
Then, what I really want is just the first line of text - that is, the
+ title at the top of the page - but I'm guessing it's not going to co
+nveniently insert carriage returns that I can recognize - or will it?
<p>

So even better would be
<code>
@lines =  = some-other-pdftotext-command('foo.pdf');
[download]

Thanks.