David,

Thanks a lot for your information, and for your time spent in trying the solution!
I tried iSED QuickPDF and it solves my problem.
What I need is quite simple, and this component offers more than that.
I made a little program test, which calls extractFilePageText() method and do the job efficiently.

The SedTech site offers free downloads, as you told me, and moreover, samples and a discussion forum, where I found opinions and other more complex samples, for instance a sample to create a xml document containing text extracted from a pdf file.

thanks again,

>If the PDF actually contains text and not just an image of text your job will be >easier. Otherwise, you'll need a converter that has OCR capabilities, such as Amyuni's >AdLib products (pricey).
>
>However, for extracting actual text from a PDF, you can find multiple toolkits, >including several with a COM interface. A few good places to look:
>
>www.pdfzone.com
>www.planetpdf.com
>
>I have been researching a different problem related to PDF, so I cannot absolutely >recommend a solution for your need at the moment, but one product that I liked a lot >is iSED QuickPDF from www.sedtech.com, which can read and write PDF files, including >simple changes like adding pages, bookmarks, annotations, and so forth. It's >reasonably priced ($59 I think) and has a fully-functional demo download.

>I just initialized the QuickPDF COM component in VFP8 and Intellisense showed me these >two methods of interest to you:

>extractFilePageContent
>extractFilePageText

>Alternatively, especially if the PDF is consistently in the same kind of format, you >can use VFP's low-level file functions to read in the PDF file and parse its structure >to find the text (not for the faint of heart). There are some toolkits that convert >the PDF structure into something like a document object model that you can then walk >to find your info, making the job much easier.