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?

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

Any suggestions?

Answer 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.