Unicode to ASCII

[Todd Gruhn <tgruhn2%gmail.com@localhost>]

I extracted the "text" from a large PDF using a NetBSD prog called
pdftotext(1).

I got the desired ASCII text, but it has many occurances of the sequence
\x{80}\x{9c} ... \x{80}\x{9d}

Is there a nice and universal utility that can convert these to ASCII chars?
Someone mentioned EMACS... What about in pkgsrc?