taxize was seven years old this last Saturday!What is taxize? taxize is designed around making working with taxonomic names easier - abstracting away the details of what each of 20 or so taxonomic data sources require for a given use case.

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.

Nearly 4 years ago I wrote on this blog about an R package solr for working with the database Solr. Since then we’ve created a refresh of that package in the solrium package. Since solrium first hit CRAN about two years ago, users have raised a number of issues that required breaking changes. Thus, this blog post is about a major version bump in solrium.What is Solr?

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

Release 1.4 of the magick package introducesa new feature called image convolution thatwas requested by Thomas L. Pedersen. In this post we explain what this is all about.Kernel Matrix The new image_convolve() function applies a kernel over the image. Kernel convolution means that each pixel value is recalculated using the weighted neighborhood sum defined in the kernel matrix.

This week we released version 3.0 of the curl R package to CRAN. You may have never used this package directly, but curl provides the foundation for most HTTP infrastructure in R, including httr, rvest, and all packages that build on it. If R packages need to go online, chances are traffic is going via curl.

We have started working on a new rOpenSci package called writexl. This package wraps the very powerful libxlsxwriter library which allows for exporting data to Microsoft Excel format. The major benefit of writexl over other packages is that it is completely written in C and has absolutely zero dependencies. No Java, Perl or Rtools are required.Getting Started The write_xlsx function writes a data frame to an xlsx file.

The new rOpenSci spelling package provides utilities for spell checking common document formats including latex, markdown, manual pages, and DESCRIPTION files. It also includes tools especially for package authors to automate spell checking of R documentation and vignettes.Spell Checking Packages The main purpose of this package is to quickly find spelling errors in R packages.

Last week we released an update of the tesseract package to CRAN. This package provides R bindings to Google’s OCR library Tesseract.install.packages("tesseract") The new version ships with the latest libtesseract 3.05.01 on Windows and MacOS.