Actually, I probably need to update this, as I now have Adobe Reader 6, and with
the Text select icon I can indeed select more than just a single column.
Googling for "extract text from PDF" throws up a good number of links. A
commercial product, PDF2TXT (<http://www.verypdf.com/>) seems rather
prominent. It may also be possible using Ghostscript's pdf2ps cum
ps2ascii.