Extracting text data from PDF files

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?

In Python there is PDFMiner, but I would like to keep this analysis all in R if possible.

Any suggestions?

Solution 1:

Linux systems have pdftotext which I had reasonable success with. By default, it creates foo.txt from a give foo.pdf.

That said, the text mining packages may have converters. A quick rseek.org search seems to concur with your crantastic search.

Solution 2:

This is a very old thread, but for future reference: the pdftools R package extracts text from PDFs.

Solution 3:

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.