This week the folks at Github have open sourced their fork of libcmark (based on the extensive PR by Mathieu Duponchelle), which they use to render markdown text within documents, issues, comments and anything else on the Github website. The new release of the commonmark R package incorporates this library so that we can take advantage of Github quality markdown rendering in R. The most exciting change is that the library has gained an extension mechanism to provide optional rendering features which are missing from the commonmark spec....

• packages
• commonmark
• Markdown

Geospatial data - data embedded in a spatial context - is used across disciplines, whether it be history, biology, business, tech, public health, etc. Along with community contributors, we’re working on a suite of tools to make working with spatial data in R as easy as possible. If you’re not familiar with geospatial tools, it’s helpful to see what people do with them in the real world. Example 1 One of our geospatial packages, geonames, is used for geocoding, the practice of either sorting out place names from geographic data, or vice versa....

• geospatial

HTTP, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol is a protocol by which most of us interact with the web. When we do requests to a website in a browser on desktop or mobile, or get some data from a server in R, all of that is using HTTP. HTTP has a rich suite of status codes describing different HTTP conditions, ranging from Success to various client errors, to server errors. R has a few HTTP client libraries - crul, curl, httr, and RCurl - each of which is slightly different....

• http
• tech notes

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of extracting written or typed text from images such as photos and scanned documents into machine-encoded text. The new rOpenSci package tesseract brings one of the best open-source OCR engines to R. This enables researchers or journalists, for example, to search and analyze vast numbers of documents that are only available in printed form. People looking to extract text and metadata from pdf files in R should try our pdftools package....

• packages
• tesseract

You can find members of the rOpenSci team at various meetings and workshops around the world. Come say ‘hi’, learn about how our packages can enable your research, or about our onboarding process for contributing new packages, discuss software sustainability or tell us how we can help you do open and reproducible research.

• community
• meetings