Convert odt, doc, docx, pdf to text with python and some linux programs. Doesn't require Libreoffice.

document_to_text.py

from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
from docx import opendocx, getdocumenttext

#http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5725278/python-help-using-pdfminer-as-a-library
from pdfminer.pdfinterp import PDFResourceManager, PDFPageInterpreter
from pdfminer.converter import TextConverter
from pdfminer.layout import LAParams
from pdfminer.pdfpage import PDFPage
from cStringIO import StringIO

def convert_pdf_to_txt(path):
    rsrcmgr = PDFResourceManager()
    retstr = StringIO()
    codec = 'utf-8'
    laparams = LAParams()
    device = TextConverter(rsrcmgr, retstr, codec=codec, laparams=laparams)
    fp = file(path, 'rb')
    interpreter = PDFPageInterpreter(rsrcmgr, device)
    password = ""
    maxpages = 0
    caching = True
    pagenos=set()
    for page in PDFPage.get_pages(fp, pagenos, maxpages=maxpages, password=password,caching=caching, check_extractable=True):
        interpreter.process_page(page)
    fp.close()
    device.close()
    str = retstr.getvalue()
    retstr.close()
    return str

def document_to_text(filename, file_path):
    if filename[-4:] == ".doc":
        cmd = ['antiword', file_path]
        p = Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE)
        stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
        return stdout.decode('ascii', 'ignore')
    elif filename[-5:] == ".docx":
        document = opendocx(file_path)
        paratextlist = getdocumenttext(document)
        newparatextlist = []
        for paratext in paratextlist:
            newparatextlist.append(paratext.encode("utf-8"))
        return '\n\n'.join(newparatextlist)
    elif filename[-4:] == ".odt":
        cmd = ['odt2txt', file_path]
        p = Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE)
        stdout, stderr = p.communicate()
        return stdout.decode('ascii', 'ignore')
    elif filename[-4:] == ".pdf":
        return convert_pdf_to_txt(file_path)

.doc conversion not working
returns empty string only