There is no problem in science quite as frustrating as other peoples' data. Whether it's malformed spreadsheets, disorganized documents, proprietary file formats, data without metadata, or any other data scenario created by someone else, scientists have taken to Twitter to complain about it. As a political scientist who regularly encounters so-called "open data" in PDFs, this problem is particularly irritating. PDFs may have "portable" in their name, making them display consistently on various platforms, but that portability means any information contained in a PDF is irritatingly difficult to extract computationally. Encountering "open data" PDFs therefore makes me shout things like this repeatedly:
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://ropensci.org/blog/blog/2017/04/18/tabulizer