Interesting. I wonder if GS can be used to convert PDF To JPG and JPG back to PDF? Pillow is a better alternative to PIL if you are in need of compiling on a Mac.
Unless you have a module that can perform not only character
recognition but ALSO font recognition, I'd have to say "NO".
Embedding a bitmap image (the JPEG data) into a PDF file is NOT the
same as having ASCII (ISO-Latin-1, UTF8, whatever) TEXT strings that are
rendered using instructions for position, type-face, device resolution,
color, etc.
PDF is not an "image" file format; it is a "program" describing how
to render each page. Some of the page contents can be image bitmap data,
but a "proper" PDF has text AS text.