After playing with pdftk briefly it looks like it will be suitable and the man pages provide links to follow information ( someone have better suggestions?), pdftk uses a slightly modified iText Java library (http://itextpdf.sourceforge.net/) to read and write PDF. The author compiled this Java library using GCJ (http://gcc.gnu.org) so it could be linked with a front end written in C++. The pdftk home page is http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/. AUTHOR Sid Steward (ssteward@accesspdf.com) maintains pdftk. I did want to affirm my earlier IIRC comments. If you go get this document, wget -O 541.pdf -S -v "http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p541.pdf" and try to select a column of text, you end up with a column the width of the whole page making it impossible to get a single coherent piece of text ( worse than top posting ). I had a reprint from a science journal and checked that with same "Reader 9" software you could select individual columns. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Life without walls. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1a_explore_032009 -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/