If you don't want to install additional software on your computer you can use free service provided by Adobe to convert PDFs to other text formats.
At this moment Adobe provides service to convert to the following formats:
To convert your PDF document to either of these formats you need to send it as an e-mail attachment to following e-mail addresses:
Note that you can try opening PDF files in text editor but most probably you won't see anything readable there since most of information is compressed. But at least you can verify that this is a PDF file by looking for %PDF-1 letters at the beginning of it.
If you're really passionate in fixing and editing PDF files manually and without use of any software there are several tools on the market (like tool.pdf.Uncompress Java library) which allow converting PDF to human (I would say programmer) readable format. Once you uncompress PDF file using these tools you will see a text file in some way similar to HTML which contains set of instructions on how to draw the document. You can find full spec of PDF format here.
PDF Quick Info | |
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Portable Document Format | |
MIME Types | |
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Identifying Characters | |
Hex: 25 50 44 46 2D 31 2E ASCII: %PDF-1. | |
PDF File Opens with | |
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Open PDF File Translations: