>I have a PDF document from which I need to copy a couple of paragrahs into a word document
>
>I dont have adobe - is there any way of doing this without having to buy software

I assume you want to do that from code.

To hack into the PDF and extract some of that, you would need some very fancy libraries. Some of them are free. There are so many libraries for PDF related file manipulations, that it could get very difficult to understand what is doing that. I have used about 5 of them so far and established classes in the framework to ease in that direction.

iTextSharp does some extraction from the PDF into whatever you want. You may take a look at that.