pstotext reads one or more PostScript or PDF files, and writes to standard 
output a representation of the plain text that would be displayed if the 
PostScript file were printed. As is described in the DETAILS section below, 
this representation is only an approximation. Nevertheless, it is often 
useful for information retrieval (e.g., running grep(1) or building a
full-text index) or to recover the text from a PostScript file whose source 
you have lost.
       
pstotext calls Ghostscript, and requires Aladdin Ghostscript version 3.51 or 
newer. Ghostscript must be invokable on the current search path as gs. 
Alternatively, you can use the -gs option to specify the command (pathname 
and options) to run Ghostscript. For example, on Windows you might use -gs 
"c:\gs\gswin32c.exe -Ic:\gs;c:\gs\fonts".
       
pstotext reads and processes its command line from left to right, ignoring 
the case of options. When it encounters a pathname, it opens the file and 
expects to find a PostScript job or PDF document to process. The option - 
means to read and process a PostScript job from standard input. If no - or 
pathname arguments are encountered, pstotext reads a PostScript job from 
standard input. (PDF documents require random access, hence cannot be read 
from standard input.) You can use the -output option to specify an output file
(remember to invoke it before the input file); otherwise pstotext writes to
standard output.
       
The option -cork is only relevant for PostScript files produced by dvips from
TeX or LaTeX documents; it tells pstotext to use the Cork encoding (known as T1
in LaTeX) rather than the old TeX text encoding (known as OT1 in LaTeX).
Unfortunately files produced by dvips don't distinguish which font encodings
were used.
       
The options -landscape and -landscapeOther should be used for documents that
must be rotated 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, respectively, in
order to be readable.

The options -debug and -bboxes are mostly of use for the maintainers of
pstotext.  -debug shows Ghostscript output and error messages.  -bboxes outputs
one word per line with bounding box information. 

WWW: http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/manpages/pstotext.1.html