Extracting text data from PDF files

Question

Is it possible to parse text data from PDF files in R? There does not appear to be a relevant package for such extraction, but has anyone attempted or seen this done in R?

Answer 1

A colleague turned me on to this handy open-source tool: http://tabula.nerdpower.org/. Install, upload the PDF, and select the table in the PDF that requires data-ization. Not a direct solution in R, but certainly better than manual labor.