diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index e1e21d1eae..662d33ab2a 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -18,6 +18,8 @@ Python:
 * django-mptt - Utilities for implementing a modified pre-order traversal tree in django
 * python-magic - A python wrapper for libmagic
 * django-taggit - Simple tagging for django
+* slate - The simplest way to extract text from PDFs in Python
+
 
 Execute pip install -r requirements/production.txt to install the python/django dependencies automatically.
 
diff --git a/apps/ocr/parsers/__init__.py b/apps/ocr/parsers/__init__.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..815e868747
--- /dev/null
+++ b/apps/ocr/parsers/__init__.py
@@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
+import codecs
+import os
+import subprocess
+import tempfile
+import sys
+
+import slate
+
+from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _
+
+from ocr.parsers.exceptions import ParserError, ParserUnknownFile
+
+mimetype_registry = {}
+
+
+def register_parser(mimetype, function):
+    mimetype_registry[mimetype] = {'function': function}
+
+
+def pdf_parser(document_page):
+    fd = document_page.document.open()
+    pdf_pages = slate.PDF(fd)
+    fd.close()
+    
+    if pdf_pages[document_page.page_number - 1] == '\x0c':
+        raise ParserError
+    
+    document_page.content = pdf_pages[document_page.page_number - 1]
+    document_page.page_label = _(u'Text extracted from PDF')
+    document_page.save()
+       
+
+def parse_document_page(document_page):
+    try:
+        mimetype_registry[document_page.document.file_mimetype]['function'](document_page)
+    except KeyError:
+        raise ParserUnknownFile
+
+        
+register_parser('application/pdf', pdf_parser)
diff --git a/apps/ocr/parsers/exceptions.py b/apps/ocr/parsers/exceptions.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..e06875f222
--- /dev/null
+++ b/apps/ocr/parsers/exceptions.py
@@ -0,0 +1,10 @@
+class ParserError(Exception):
+    """
+    Raised when a text parser fails to understand a file it been passed
+    or the resulting parsed text is invalid
+    """
+    pass
+
+
+class ParserUnknownFile(Exception):
+    pass
diff --git a/requirements/development.txt b/requirements/development.txt
index 00def8c63a..3acf630b4e 100644
--- a/requirements/development.txt
+++ b/requirements/development.txt
@@ -9,3 +9,5 @@ django-celery==2.2.2
 django-sentry==1.6.0
 django-taggit==0.9.3
 -e git://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt.git@0af02a95877041b2fd6d458bd95413dc1666c321#egg=django-mptt
+slate==0.3
+PIL==1.1.7
diff --git a/requirements/production.txt b/requirements/production.txt
index 1f1d3a0881..02219abaee 100644
--- a/requirements/production.txt
+++ b/requirements/production.txt
@@ -6,3 +6,5 @@ django-celery==2.2.2
 django-sentry==1.6.0
 django-taggit==0.9.3
 -e git://github.com/django-mptt/django-mptt.git@0af02a95877041b2fd6d458bd95413dc1666c321#egg=django-mptt
+slate==0.3
+PIL==1.1.7