Is that even possible!?!
I have a bunch of legacy reports that I need to import into a database. However, they're all in pdf format. Are there any R packages that can read pdf? Or should I leave that to a command line tool?
The reports were made in excel and then pdfed, so they have regular structure, but many blank "cells".
Just a warning to others who may be hoping to extract data: PDF is a container, not a format. If the original document does not contain actual text, as opposed to bitmapped images of text or possibly even uglier things than I can imagine, nothing other than OCR can help you.
On top of that, in my sad experience there's no guarantee that apps which create PDF docs all behave the same, so the data in your table may or may not be read out in the desired order (as a result of the way the doc was built). Be cautious.
Probably better to make a couple grad students transcribe the data for you. They're cheap :-)