Dear and @academicchatter folks:

The first tool I can think of is LibreOffice Draw

Maybe there are other tools, but I think LibreOffice Draw do the job pretty well

Edit: If the PDF has written text, you may wanna use an OCR tool, but I don't have any to suggest

@ajayiyer @linux @academicchatter https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pdftotext

Try Zotero. It is a complete literature databas but it's PDF reader is very good at extracting images and text. Works on all OS, web and mobile. Native Linux client has been very smooth for me. Oh, terminal it doesn't do though. If you want to extract a large amount in an automated way, its probably not the right tool.

@ajayiyer@mastodon.social OCRmyPDF is exactly what you are looking for

gImageReader is a graphical front-end to the open-source OCR program Tesseract, so that might be just what you're looking for. The default settings don't add the OCR'd text to the PDF but you can do that.

I'm mystified that poppler-utils is not a viable option. Of course the *.pdf file would have to include the text itself, but many do.