You can start to look at pdftotext -layout and pandoc maybe. Personally I hope a day publishers start learning about the value of data and their representation

You can start to look at pdftotext -layout and pandoc maybe. Personally I hope a day publishers start learning about the value of data and their representations so they decide to embed them like a *sv file attached to a pdf where the tabular data are immediately available, a .gp and alike file for graphs etc. Essentially the concept of embedding pdf "sources" as an attachment. In LaTeX it's easy to attach the LaTeX itself to the final pdf but so far no one seems to be interested to do so as an habit.