The goal of this chapter was to learn how to export data out of a PDF file. Like sediment in a fine wine, the data in PDF files can appear at first to be very difficult to separate. Unlike decanting wine, however, which is a very passive process, separating PDF data took a lot of trial and error. We learned four ways of working with PDF files to clean data: copying and pasting, pdfMiner, Tabula, and Acrobat export. Each of these tools has certain strengths and weaknesses:
Copying and pasting costs nothing and takes very little work, but is not as effective with complicated tables.
pdfMiner/Pdf2txt is also free, and as a command-line tool, it could be automated. It also works on large amounts of data. But like copying and pasting, it is easily confused by certain types of tables.
Tabula takes some work to set up, and since it is a product undergoing development, it does occasionally give strange warnings. It is also a little slower than the other options. However, its output is very...