[R] scanning a pdf scan

[roger koenker]

I have a pdf scan of several pages of data from a quite famous old  
paper by
C.S. Pierce (1873).  I would like (what else?) to convert it into an  
R dataframe.
Somewhat to my surprise the pdf seems to already be in a character  
recognized
form, since I can search for numerical strings and they are nicely  
found.  Of
course, as is usual with such tables there are also headings and  
column lines, etc
etc. that are less interesting than the numbers themselves.  I've  
tried saving the
pdf in various formats, some of which look vaguely tractable, but I'm  
hoping
that there is something that is more automatic.

Does anyone have experience that they could share toward this objective?


url:    www.econ.uiuc.edu/~roger            Roger Koenker
email    rkoenker at uiuc.edu            Department of Economics
vox:     217-333-4558                University of Illinois
fax:       217-244-6678                Champaign, IL 61820