Rahul Saigal has an excellent step-by-step post on how to extract data from tables in PDFS with Tabula and OpenRefine. I've had great success with Tabula, and am really starting to get excited about OpenRefine as well, having just completed this free online course, which I highly recommend: Introduction to OpenRefine.
From the introduction to Rahul's post:
While you could manually extract data from a table in a PDF, it's far from simple. There's no reason to take that much time when there are tools to make our job simpler. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to extract table from the PDF easily with Tabula, and then clean the messy data to a more usable form with OpenRefine.
Have fun!
