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 purely R solution could be:

library('tm')
file <- 'namefile.pdf'
Rpdf <- readPDF(control = list(text = "-layout"))
corpus <- VCorpus(URISource(file), 
      readerControl = list(reader = Rpdf))
corpus.array <- content(content(corpus)[[1]])

then you'll have pdf lines in an array.