pdfboxr

The R package pdfboxr provides an interface to the Apache PDFBox library.

Installation

remotes::install_gitlab("schwe/pdfboxr")

Basic usage

library("pdfboxr")

args(read_chars)

#R> function (file, pages = integer(), adjust = TRUE, size_pt = FALSE, 
#R>     digits = 2L, password = "", max_memory = -1L, temp_dir = "") 
#R> NULL

pdf_file <- system.file("pdfs/cars.pdf", package = "pdfboxr")
d <- read_chars(pdf_file)
d

#R> A pdf document with 2 pages and
#R>   metainfo text fonts
#R> 1        2  313     3
#R> elements.

The function read.pdf() returns an object of class pdf_document (a list containing data.frame's). The pdf_document object contains the elements:

• "metainfo"
• "text"
• "fonts"

The elements can be accessed as by each other list.

head(d[["text"]])

#R>   pid text                  font size     x0     y0     x1    y1 width height yscale xscale rotation
#R> 1   1    c BAAAAA+LiberationSans   10 288.20 769.12 293.20 774.7  5.00   5.58     10     10        0
#R> 2   1    a BAAAAA+LiberationSans   10 293.20 769.12 298.76 774.7  5.56   5.58     10     10        0
#R> 3   1    r BAAAAA+LiberationSans   10 298.79 769.12 302.12 774.7  3.33   5.58     10     10        0
#R> 4   1    s BAAAAA+LiberationSans   10 302.09 769.12 307.09 774.7  5.00   5.58     10     10        0
#R> 5   1    s          Courier-Bold   12  77.20 747.29  84.40 753.6  7.20   6.31     12     12        0
#R> 6   1    p          Courier-Bold   12  84.40 747.29  91.60 753.6  7.20   6.31     12     12        0

The R package pdfboxr only returns raw data extracted from the PDF-file. To refine this raw data into a format usable for data analysis the pdfmole can be used.