Maintaining tabs when scraping PDF using read_lines()

[adambickford]

I am scraping a pdf file with the following code:

f.data <- pdf_text(infile) %>% readr::read_lines() %>% str_trim(side="both")

"infile" is the PDF file

There is a lot of lines of text that I have to pass through, but the lines I want are part of a tab-delimited table.
It appears that readr:read_lines converts any tab-stops it encounters to spaces.
Is there a way for readr to maintain the tab stops in specific lines?

TIA
AB

[technocrat]

Probably something pdftools can do more simply