As the others said before, the PDF format was intended to be read-only. The PDF format was invented by Adobe, and their Acrobat is the official software to create (and maybe modify) PDF files.
However, there is some shareware product pdf2text, which extracts the text portions at least.
But PDF files can be secured in such way, that neither printing nor selecting text for the clipboard is possible.
To create PDF documents without Acrobat, you can use GhostScript and it's utilities, which comes either under the GNU licence or, from Aladdin, under a similar licence (though I never understood that policy: Do you have to put the documents produced with GhostScript under the licence, too?).