That does seem weird that the text contents are available for matching but not as script input. Since I have to go to an external script, I will probably just end up doing it all there.
Thanks.
BTW, I found
https://www.xpdfreader.com/pdftotext-man.html to do a pretty good and quick job of converting pdfs to text files. I use this on my Mac. A couple of notes with this utility.
1) I use the switch -l 1 which sets the last page to convert to page 1 because all the identifying info I need is on page 1.
2) In the docs, there is a little blurb that if you set the output file name to -, it sends the output text to STDOUT which is what I want