Any idea how can I retrieve the text from a pdf image. I'm getting some of the articles in a pdf magazine.
Bonzok, I have tried this thing of pdf magazine. It really worked for me quite a few times. The best thing is that you need be rewriting that article.

Now about your question, there are some E Books from which you can select the text as in any other text document (For dummies series). Only thing is that you must select the "Cursor" in the pdf reader in place of that "Hand tool" .
Now if you are talking about those scanned magazines as
@johnconnor said. For those you will need office 2007- One Note software! If you have it then Bingo! you are ready to go.
Now open your scanned copy of magazine. Zoom the required page to such a level that the font of the text material shows most clear-cut margin.(I used to select 150% zoom). Keep the page of magazine page open in background, don?t minimize it. Now open "Office One Note" In its toolbar you will see a tool named "
CLIP" select it. You will see a whitish colored page of you magazine.
Now select a appropriate part of the page containing the required text (Its like Crop option in image editor). When you have selected the part, that part will be copied in "One Note" automatically.
Now the juicy step

, Now right click that copied part in one note, You will see the first option as "Copy text from picture".
Hit it. That's it!
Now open the MS Word. Hit "Paste". You will see that text copied in word. If your magazine copy is well scanned. Then it's good. But a fair copy, then you would need to correct some words.
If you don't have MS office 2007. Then you may try "Optical Character Recognition" softwares e.g. JOCR (It's free I think!). But I haven't personally tried them yet. There are some paid softwares also claiming to perform better than others. Give them a shot.
Hope this helped!
