How to get rid of escape sequences in text file

[Gordon Charrick <gordonmc@xxxxxxx>]

I'm looking for a way to convert a file with control characters that do 
things like bold, underline, etc into a plain ordinary text file. I 
haven't figured out how to do it yet. Anyone have a nice simple 
solution? An example of a file with this problem is 
/usr/share/doc/pam-0.77/txts/pam.txt (this is from FC2, but I imagine 
the file is pretty much the same in FC3).

--
Gordon Charrick