Parsing and reading text from PDF files

One of my development teams was looking for a PDF parsing library. They essentially wanted to search and extract data from PDF files. At first, I thought that OCR is the only way to achieve this, but there are libraries available to help us :)

PDFBox : This seems to be most popular library for extracting text out of PDF files. This is a Java library, but also has a .NET wrapper around it using iKVM.NET
Simple examples using this library can be found here and here.

iText & iTextSharp : These libraries are very popular for PDF generation and can also be used for extracting text from PDF files. Sample example can be found here.

I have heard that OpenOffice.org also provides you with a Java API that can be used to create and manipulate PDF files, but have not tried it yet.

.NET PDF creation tools

Some time back, I had blogged about the opensource tools available in Java and .NET for PDF creation. Recently came across another commerical library called "Dynamic PDF" for PDF creation. This library has a Java and .NET version of the API.
The library is easy to use and is very robust. It handles 'over-flowing' tables and text areas in PDF files very gracefully.
Another interesting library that Dynamic PDF sells is the DynamicPDF™ PrintManager for .NET . This library makes it so simple to print PDFs and also has callback handlers for error messages from printers - all pure managed code. Now that's what I like :)

Two opensource .NET PDF generation tools are PDFSharp and iTextSharp.