R help - Dec 2013 - Any R packages support conversion from PDF to XLS ?

Pretty much nothing can convert arbitrary PDF files to unicode.  It depends a
lot on what is in the PDF to begin with -- properly encoded text or just
bitmapped images, for example.  
I would recommend you search around to see whether  there's a related
archive in a different format.
And in any case, this has nothing to do with "XLS" , as Excel can read
any
unicode file.


woof wrote
> Hi!
> Is there any packages support conversion from PDF to XLS ? 
> My raw data is from government website with PDF format only and updated
> every month around hundreds files, so I need automated conversion.
> The PDF is composed with Asian characters so I hope the packages could
> process unicode content.
> 
> Thank you!
> Woof




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> Pretty much nothing can convert arbitrary PDF files to unicode.  It 
> depends a 
> lot on what is in the PDF to begin with -- properly encoded text or just 
> bitmapped images, for example.   
> I would recommend you search around to see whether  there's a related 
> archive in a different format.

If that isn't available, one could use tabula[1] to extract tables from 
pdfs as csv.

HTH

[1] http://tabula.nerdpower.org