How to install poppler 0.73 on ubuntu 18.04

I created a PPA with backports of Poppler 0.74.0 for Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic). This is now the recommended way to update your poppler.

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:cran/poppler
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y libpoppler-cpp-dev

To make it working we need to do the following:

1. Uninstall the libpoppler-cpp-dev package

   sudo apt purge libpoppler-cpp-dev
   

2. Compile and install Poppler 0.73 with checkinstall (as you already did) to the /usr/local:

   sudo apt-get install libopenjp2-7-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev cmake checkinstall
   sudo apt-get build-dep libpoppler-cpp-dev
   
   cd ~/Downloads
   wget https://poppler.freedesktop.org/poppler-0.73.0.tar.xz
   tar -xf poppler-0.73.0.tar.xz
   cd poppler-0.73.0
   
   mkdir build
   cd build
   cmake ..
   sudo checkinstall make install
   

3. Define the environment variable R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH to inform R about the Poppler libraries in /usr/local/lib:

   echo "export R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH=\$R_LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/lib" >> .bashrc
   

4. Compile the pdftools R-package inside R-shell:

   install.packages("pdftools")
   

5. Test it from R-shell with any pdf-file

   > pdftools::pdf_data(pdf="/usr/share/cups/data/default.pdf")
   [1]]
   [1] width  height x      y      space  text  
   <0 rows> (or 0-length row.names)
   

Note: I tested this method on my clean Ubuntu 18.04 LTS VM with both R 3.4 and 3.5.2 from R-shell and from RStudio.