.pdf to text. Best options suggestions please

I know Audrey said on 9 Jan that .pdf upload is coming. The issue is VERY important to me, and so much so that it could drive me to Perplexity Pro (but it has a persistence issue unfortunately).

In the meantime, I’ve tried various programs to convert .pdf to text with unacceptable results or speed. All methods and programs except for .pdf openned in Word and then saved as .txt had unacceptable artifacts on multi-column pages and various other formatting situations. .pdf openned in Word and then saved as .txt is glacially slow. Please advise soonest. I have a demo of Canopy+GPT 4.0 on 16 Jan that will be diminished without a solution to this problem. An even more important one at the CIO/CEO level 29 Jan.