This week we released version 1.0 of the ropensci pdftools package to CRAN. Pdftools provides utilities for extracting text, fonts, attachments and other data from PDF files. It also supports rendering of PDF files into bitmap images. This release has a few internal enhancements and fixes an annoying bug for landscape PDF pages.

A few weeks ago we announced the first release of the tesseract package: a high quality OCR engine in R. We have now released an update with extra features.Installing Training Data As explained in the first post, the tesseract system is powered by language specific training data. By default only English training data is installed.

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol by which mostof us interact with the web. When we do requests to a website in a browseron desktop or mobile, or get some data from a server in R, all of that isusing HTTP.

A new package crul ison CRAN. crul is another HTTP client for R, but is relatively simplifiedcompared to httr, and is being builtto link closely with webmockr and vcr. webmockr andvcr are packages ported from Ruby’s webmockand vcr, respectively.They both make mocking HTTP requests really easy. A major use case for mocking HTTP requests is for unit tests.

A new package isdparser ison CRAN. isdparser was in part liberated from rnoaa,then improved. We’ll use isdparser in rnoaa soon. isdparser does not download files for you from NOAA’s ftp servers. Thepackage focuses on parsing the files, which are variable length ASCII stringsstored line by line, where each line has some mandatory data, and any amountof optional data.

A new package gpg has appeared on CRAN. From the package description: The package features a beautiful vignette to get you started with using GPG in R. Some highlights from the vignette below.Example: encryption Suppose we want to send an email Glenn Greenwald containing top secret information. His homepage at the intercept shows Greenwalds GPG fingerprint.

Whether you are an environmental scientist, a pollution expert or just concerned about the air you breathe when cycling in the United Kingdom, the ropensci rdefra package can help find the information you need. This package gives you access to the UK-AIR database, hosted by the Department for Environment, Food &

The new ropensci graphql package is now on CRAN.

A new version of the ropensci hunspell package has been released to CRAN. Hunspell is the spell checker library used by LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Mac OS-X, InDesign, Opera, RStudio and many others. It provides a system for tokenizing, stemming and spelling in almost any language or alphabet.

A new version of the ropensci magick package has been released to CRAN. Magick is a package for Advanced Image-Processing in R. It wraps the ImageMagick STL which is perhaps the most comprehensive open-source image processing library available today. Our original announcement has more details.New features This new version now includes a beautiful vignette which gives an overview of the main functionality to get you started!