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

I used an external utility to do the conversion and called it from R. All files had a leading table with the desired information

Set path to pdftotxt.exe and convert pdf to text

exeFile <- "C:/Projects/xpdfbin-win-3.04/bin64/pdftotext.exe"

for(i in 1:length(pdfFracList)){
    fileNumber <- str_sub(pdfFracList[i], start = 1, end = -5)
    pdfSource <- paste0(reportDir,"/", fileNumber, ".pdf")
    txtDestination <- paste0(reportDir,"/", fileNumber, ".txt")
    print(paste0("File number ", i, ", Processing file ", pdfSource))
    system(paste(exeFile, "-table" , pdfSource, txtDestination, sep = " "), wait = TRUE)
}