rOpenSci HQ What would you like to hear about in an rOpenSci Community Call? We are soliciting your “votes” and new ideas for Community Call topics and speakers. Find out how you can influence us by checking out our new Community Calls repository. Videos, speaker’s slides, resources and collaborative notes from our Community Call on Reproducible Workflows at Scale with drake are posted. Help wanted!

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!

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. The version bump to 1.0 signifies that the package has undergone sufficient testing and the API is stable.

Scientific articles are typically locked away in PDF format, a format designed primarily for printing but not so great for searching or indexing. The new pdftools package allows for extracting text and metadata from pdf files in R. From the extracted plain-text one could find articles discussing a particular drug or species name, without having to rely on publishers providing metadata, or pay-walled search engines.