<p>The current package <em>du jour</em> for getting text out of PDFs is <a href="https://ropensci.org/blog/2016/03/01/pdftools-and-jeroen" rel="noreferrer"><code>pdftools</code></a> (successor to Rpoppler, noted above), works great on Linux, Windows and OSX:</p>

<pre><code>install.packages("pdftools")
library(pdftools)
download.file("http://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.2805.pdf", "1403.2805.pdf", mode = "wb")
txt &lt;- pdf_text("1403.2805.pdf")

# first page text
cat(txt[1])

# second page text
cat(txt[2])
</code></pre>
Reading data from PDF files into R
<p>Is that even possible!?!</p>

<p>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 <code>R</code> packages that can read pdf?  Or should I leave that to a command line tool?</p>

<p>The reports were made in excel and then pdfed, so they have regular structure, but many blank "cells".</p>