(require (planet gcr/pdf-render:2:=0))
This library lets Racket render PDF files. You can also gather information about the text or layout.
This requires libpoppler, and thus likely only works on Linux or Mac OSX. Windows might work if you insctall Poppler, but I can’t make promises.

Hacker News
This tiny script is a scraper for http://news.ycombinator.com. It shows just how little Ruby is required to run a powerful web filter.

What it be doin':
Fetches the YCombinator news page
HPricot's it into pieces
Builds an RSS feed
Uses links to parse the destination article page and include the main text inline
Runs as a stand-alone server thanks to Rack and Mongrel