Jonathan said:
Although probably the reason the text is in PDF format is that the
author did not want your to edit it, but one can always do a screen
capture and use an OCR program to convert to text in a pinch. Textbridge
for WinBoxes I am sure some comparable program for Mac
Some PDF conversions that I came across didn't allow highlighting of text.
Even Acrobat Reader 7 (Linux) could not handle it. There is an option under
"File" for exporting the document as text. This does a tremendous job, but
the output is sometimes void.
Screen captures are tedious and they require some demanding software to do
text recognition. They will also suffer from equations, figures, etc. and
will not hold information about structure (e.g. nested bulletpoints).
My advice to you is to get hold of the source. It will take you less time
than that struggle with annoying PDF's. That's why some people prefer
sending the LaTeX around. If you want to view it, compile it on your
machine... as HTML (latex2html), as PostScript, as PDF, or whatever you
fancy.
Roy