It has been a while since we posted an update about magick, but behind the scenes we are constantly tweaking and improving this package, which has become a very mature and complete toolkit for image processing in R. Over the past year, we did 6 CRAN releases, containing many small features and fixes, but perhaps more importantly, the package is getting betting better due to updates of the underlying ImageMagick library.

This week we released a major new version of the rsvg package on CRAN. This package provides R bindings to librsvg2 which is a powerful system library for rendering svg images into bitmaps that can be displayed, or use for further processing in for example the magick package. The biggest change in this release is the R package on Windows and MacOS now includes the latest librsvg 2.48.4. This is a major upgrade;

Image processing is one of the core focus areas of rOpenSci.

A new version of pdftools has been released to CRAN. Go get it while it’s hot:install.packages("pdftools") This version has two major improvements: low level text extraction and encoding improvements.About PDF textboxes A pdf document may seem to contain paragraphs or tables in a viewer, but this is not actually true.

Last week Google and friends released the new major version of their OCR system: Tesseract 4. This release builds upon 2+ years of hard work and has completely overhauled the internal OCR engine. From the tesseract wiki: We have now also updated the R package tesseract to ship with the new Tesseract 4 on MacOS and Windows. It uses the new engine by default, and the results are extremely impressive!

rOpenSci’s software engineer / postdoc Jeroen Ooms will explain what images are, under the hood, and showcase several rOpenSci packages that form a modern toolkit for working with images in R, including opencv, av, tesseract, magick and pdftools. 🕘 Thursday, November 15, 2018, 10-11AM PST; 7-8PM CET (find your timezone) ☎️ Find all details for joining the call on our Community Calls page.Everyone is welcome.

Earlier this month we released a new version of the tesseract package to CRAN. This package provides R bindings to Google’s open source optical character recognition (OCR) engine Tesseract. Two major new features are support for HOCR and support for the upcoming Tesseract 4.hOCR output Support for HOCR output was requested by one of our users on Github.

This week magick 1.6 appeared on CRAN. This release is a big all-round maintenance update with lots of tweaks and improvements across the package. The NEWS file gives an overview of changes in this version.

A post by on the Plaza blog Expanded access to images in the Biodiversity Literature Repository has prompted me to write up a little toy I created earlier this week. The Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR) is a repository of taxonomic papers hosted by Zenodo. Where possible Plazi have extracted individual images and added those to the BLR, even if the article itself is not open access.

This week magick 1.5 appeared on CRAN. The latest update adds support for using images in knitr documents and shiny apps.