We have released updates for the rOpenSci text analysis tools. This technote will highlight some of the major improvements in the spelling package and also the underlying hunspell package, which provides the spelling engine for the spelling package. install.packages("spelling") Update to the latest versions to use these cool new features!

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.

In case I forget how to do this, and as an example of how easy it is to get sucked into a black hole of programming micro-details, I spent a hour or more trying to figure out how to handle Japanese characters. I'm building a database of publications linked to taxonomic names, and I'm interested in linking to electronic versions of those publications.