Hi, mocore!
Text version is small, of course, especially being gzipped
but original pdf is much smoother to read. Corebook.pdf is only 1M size, mupdf.tcz is 3.3M with dependencies. Not an issue nowadays, I hope. But of course .txt will save if You can not start X. Thanks for a tip!
P.S. By the way using -layout option for pdftotext gives slightly more readable output.