Convert PDF to an Excel or CSV

General
1

Hello i am very new to R, i am looking at how to convert a PDF to Excel. is there any example code and i can try?

2

This is a tougher task than it might seem, since PDF encoding is very complicated and can't always be extracted with the same spatial relations we perceive. For instance, copy-pasting from a PDF table often yields garbage.

Here's a blog post walking through one way:

If you've converted the data to image (eg using imagemagick) you could then perform OCR with Tesseract:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tesseract/vignettes/intro.html

3

thank you, i have managed to convert the PDF into images and output a CSV, how would i go about formating this CSV. e.g. separate the spaces into cells

here my code so far

library(tesseract)
library(pdftools)

# Render pdf to png image

img_file <- pdftools::pdf_convert("filepath/test.pdf", format = 'tiff',  dpi = 400)

# Extract text from png image
text <- ocr(img_file)
writeLines(text, "filepath/mydata.csv")
4

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