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PDF utilities

Source: R/tools.R
pdftools.Rd

Utilities based on libpoppler for extracting text, fonts, attachments and metadata from a pdf file.

Usage

pdf_info(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_text(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_data(pdf, font_info = FALSE, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_fonts(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_attachments(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_toc(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

pdf_pagesize(pdf, opw = "", upw = "")

Arguments

pdf

file path or raw vector with pdf data

opw

string with owner password to open pdf

upw

string with user password to open pdf

font_info

if TRUE, extract font-data for each box. Be careful, this requires a very recent version of poppler and will error otherwise.

Details

The pdf_text function renders all textboxes on a text canvas and returns a character vector of equal length to the number of pages in the PDF file. On the other hand, pdf_data is more low level and returns one data frame per page, containing one row for each textbox in the PDF.

Note that pdf_data requires a recent version of libpoppler which might not be available on all Linux systems. When using pdf_data in R packages, condition use on poppler_config()$has_pdf_data which shows if this function can be used on the current system. For Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and 18.04 (Bionic) you can use the PPA with backports of Poppler 0.74.0.

Poppler is pretty verbose when encountering minor errors in PDF files, in especially pdf_text. These messages are usually safe to ignore, use suppressMessages to hide them altogether.

See also

Other pdftools: pdf_ocr_text(), qpdf, rendering

Examples

# Just a random pdf file
pdf_file <- file.path(R.home("doc"), "NEWS.pdf")
info <- pdf_info(pdf_file)
text <- pdf_text(pdf_file)
fonts <- pdf_fonts(pdf_file)
files <- pdf_attachments(pdf_file)