Can anyone recommend a library/API for extracting the text and images from a PDF?
We need to be able to get at text that is contained in pre-known regions of the document, so the API will need to give us positional information of each element on the page. 

We would like that data to be output in `xml` or `json` format. We're currently looking at *PdfTextStream* which seems pretty good, but would like to hear other peoples experiences and suggestions.

**Are there alternatives (commercial ones or free) for extracting text from a pdf programatically?**