I have been using the XML package successfully for extracting HTML tables but want to extend to PDF's. From previous questions it does not appear that there is a simple R solution but wondered if there had been any recent developments
Failing that, is there some way in Python (in which I am a complete Novice) to  obtain
and manipulate pdfs so that I could finish the job off with the R XML package
Extracting text from PDFs is hard, and nearly always requires lots of care.
I'd start with the command line tools such as pdftotext and see what they spit out. The problem is that PDFs can store the text in any order, can use awkward font encodings, and can do things like use ligature characters (the joined up 'ff' and 'ij' that you see in proper typesetting) to throw you. 
pdftotext is installable on any Linux system...
PDF scraping using R