Article 978912 of rec.arts.sf.fandom:
From: Dan Hoey <haoyuep@aol.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom
Subject: Re: This newsgroup was touted in a Denvention newsletter
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:59:18 -0400

Keith F. Lynch wrote:
> Thanks, but I find it much easier to just read the surreal-looking
> paragraphs and get the gist of what's being said.  How could I have
> gotten the correct column numbers, anyway?  Repeated trial and error?

> I'm not particular troubled by long lines per se, as I can easily
> rewrap them in Emacs.
[...]
In Emacs, the easiest thing to do is turn off line wrapping, and
navigate your viewport around the output of "pdftotext -layout" to
find what you want.  It's also a good way to find the column numbers,
but you can more easily use Emacs's rectangle commands to extract what
you want to quote.

Emacs can also handle the replacement of UTF-8 characters, but AKICIF
knows why you can't search and destroy the "\324"s.  You can, however,
replace "\324-" with "-", etc.

Dan Hoey
haoyuep@aol.com