Well, I tried a quick test of the Save As Excel and also Word and the conversion replaces hyphens with bullets; -$20,083.86 becomes •$20,083.86 and 18-JUN-2013 becomes 18•JUN•2013
I can work with this if I have to, but it certainly is a cludgy approach.
Do you happen to know if there's a routine in the VB-accessible SDK that allows me to fetch a block of text without any parsing by the SDK? That is, if I could read the contents of the PDF as a stream of characters and do my own parsing, perhaps I could see the hyphens.