This is an idea for an /etc/mailcap entry for pdftotext.  It would allow

    see foo.pdf

on a tty, or an explicit text rendition by

    run-mailcap --action=cat foo.pdf

This is similar to the mailcap setups various html to text renderers
have.

I get some joy from the lines of debian/poppler-utils.mime below which
dh_installmime can copy to /usr/lib/mime/packages/poppler-utils

I don't know if type application/x-pdf is desirable or necessary or what
now but xpdf has it for its mailcap entries.