pdf-scraping

Is that even possible!?! I have a bunch of legacy reports that I need to import into a database. However, they're all in pdf format. Are there any R packages that can read pdf? Or should I leave that to a command line tool? The reports were made in excel and then pdfed, so they have regular structure, but many blank "cells". Just a warning to others who may be hoping to extract data: PDF is a container, not a format. If the original document does not contain actual text, as opposed to bitmapped images of text or possibly even uglier things than I can imagine, nothing other than OCR can help

Is there a good library for extracting text from a PDF? I'm willing to pay for it if I have to. Something that works with C# or classic ASP (VBScript) would be ideal and I also need to be able to separate the pages from the PDF. This question had some interesting stuff, especially pdftotext but I'd like to avoid calling to an external command-line app if I can. You can use the IFilter interface built into Windows to extract text and properties (author, title, etc.) from any supported file type. It's a COM interface so you would have use the .NET interop facilities. You'd also have to download

I have tried the example code recommended in the tm::readPDF documentation : library(tm) if(all(file.exists(Sys.which(c("pdfinfo", "pdftotext"))))) { uri <- system.file(file.path("doc", "tm.pdf"), package = "tm") pdf <- readPDF(PdftotextOptions = "-layout")(elem = list(uri = uri), language = "en", id = "id1") pdf[1:13] } But I get the following error (which occurs after calling the function returned by readPDF ): Error in file(con, "r") : cannot open the connection In addition: Warning message: In file(con, "r") : cannot open file 'C:\DOCUME~1\Tomas\LOCALS~1\Temp\RtmpU33iWo\pdfinfo31c2bd5762a'

What good libraries are there, in any common language, for converting PDF to HTML? PDFBox at apache has an html extraction capability. http://pdfbox.apache.org/ If you are working on a Windows box, I think Amyuni has a library for this as well. Their PDF Document Convertor is accessible as a DLL, can be used widely among the languages supported by Visual Studio, and can convert to RTF, TML, EXCEL, JPEG, and TIFF. http://www.lowagie.com/iText/ Opensource library for both Java and C# The pdftohtml program converts pdf to html and xml and preserves position information of the text which is

Are there any open source libraries that support table identification & extraction? By this I mean: Identify a table structure exists Classify the table from its contents Extract data from the table in a useful output format e.g. JSON / CSV etc. I have looked through similar questions on this topic and found the following: PDFMiner which addresses problem 3, but it seems the user is required to specify to PDFMiner where a table structure exists for each table (correct me if I'm wrong) pdf-table-extract which attempts to address problem 1 but according to the To-Do list, cannot currently

I'm trying to extract data from tables inside some pdf reports. I've seen some examples using either pdftools and similar packages I was successful in getting the text, however, I just want to extract the tables. Is there a way to use R to recognize and extract only tables? Awsome question, I wondered about the same thing recently, thanks! I did it, with tabulizer ‘0.2.2’ as @hrbrmstr suggests too. If you are using R version 3.5.2, I'm providing following solution. Install the three packages in specific order: # install.packages("rJava") # library(rJava) # load and attach 'rJava' now # install