Using pg_dump on a view always produces an empty file
Is there any way of using pg_dump against a view. The postgres
documentation suggests it should be possible

This is not an answer to your question per-se, but the PostgreSQL documentation is certainly very ambiguous there, so I submitted a patch to clarify what will be dumped (in particular, only the definitions of views), which has been accepted and will be reflected in the current documentation soon.
As mentioned in the comments, the only way to extract the data generated by a view is via psql's \copy command, or possibly the COPY command itself.