Thanks once again - so pdfs containing regular text should be ok. What I'm still afraid of is pdfs of scanned files that contain the text as images - this is what I would use djvu for. It would be great if you could test the following two files (just two random djvu's I found on the web having similar layouts to the files I'd like to read):
http://www.vincent-net.com/luc/paper...ewPrivacy.djvu
http://www.celartem.com/en/djvu_file.../djvuspec.djvu