Viewing PDFs as text?

[Alan]

Less (via lesspipe, I think) is able to read pdf files as text, using
pdftotext.  It would be much easier for me to browse pdfs using
emacs.

I would like to do this from dired.

There is a doc-view.el facility, that seems too complicated for me.
Did I misunderstand that, or is it possible in some other way to view
pdfs from dired, as text?

Thank you for any ideas.

Alan Davis