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What's New in R: May 28, 2024

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R​! This week, we’re featuring two tutorials on manipulating images with the {magick} package and a package that helps you make better line charts. Let’s dive in!

Convert iPhone Photos to PNG in 12 Lines of R Code!

File this under things you might never have considered using R for but are actually quite useful: In this YouTube video, Lee Durbin shows how to use R to convert photos from the iPhone-specific .HEIC format to the more common .PNG format using the {magick} R package. Even if you don’t need to convert .HEIC files to .PNG, it’s a good way to learn about some of the things you can do with the {magick} package, which allows you to manipulate images in all sorts of ways from within R (see, for example, this blog post by Garrick Aden Buie on processing profile photos for posit::conf 2022).

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Add text on images using R

Sticking with the {magick} package, this blog post by Miriam Lerma shows how you can add text directly on images. This is useful if, say, you want to add annotations to images.

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{ggborderline}

Ever made a line chart and had trouble distinguishing the lines? There are a bunch of options to deal with this, but one new (to me) one is the {ggborderline} package. This package adds a little border around each line (similar to the {shadowtext} package), making it easier to tell them apart.

Read More →

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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!

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David Keyes
By David Keyes
May 28, 2024

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