How to convert PDF to (La)TeX?

If you install AbiWord with the additional import and export plugins,* you can open a PDF file in the Word Processor, and then export to LaTeX. In fact, you can also convert from the command line:

abiword --to=tex filename.pdf

Be warned that both its PDF import routine and its LaTeX export routine have serious limitations, and you should not expect anything that will be usable without serious tweaking afterwards.

(* IIRC, the extra plugins are installed by selecting a custom install on Windows and checking all the import and export options it gives you. For Linux, you typically need to install a separate package called "abiword-plugins" or "abiword-plugin-mathview" depending on distro. No clue for Mac.)

Inkscape can open PDFs and export to either PSTricks or TikZ codes; this might be useful if the PDF in question is just a diagram or vector image you want to edit.

There's a project listed on sourceforge called pdf2latex, but it doesn't look like any real work has been done on it. I'm not sure it's a real project. (The page looks fishy; almost as if someone was just posting an idea.)

Check out InftyReader.

Quoting the start page:

InftyReader is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) application that recognizes and translates scientific documents (including math symbols) into LaTeX, MathML and XHTML!

I found no tool that can deal with formatting, but for extracting the text on Linux, there is a two step procedure that produces good results:

$ pdf2ps paper.pdf
$ ps2ascii paper.ps > paper.txt

From: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=recovertex