From: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14449968/find-string-inside-pdf-with-shell
Find string inside pdf with shell
As nicely pointed by Simon, you can simply convert the pdf to plain text using pdftotext, and then, just search for what you’re looking for.
After conversion, you may use grep, bash regex, or any variation you want:
while read line; do if [[ ${line} =~ [0-9]{4}(-[0-9]{2}){2} ]]; then echo ">>> Found date;"; fi done <<(pdftotext infile.pdf -)