Maarten Van Horenbeeck posted a diary entry (July 2008) explaining how scripts and data are stored in PDF documents (using streams), and demonstrated a Perl script to decompress streams. A couple of months before, I had started developing my pdf-parser tool, and Maarten's diary entry motivated me to continue adding features to pdf-parser.
Remark 2: don't use this method when the stream contains an exploit for the decompressor.