What’s New in R: June 15, 2026
Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a talk on keeping your R package environments from breaking over time, a community session packed with productivity tips and real-world lessons, and a guide to migrating your PDF reports from pagedown to Typst. Let's dive in!
Great Scott! A chronicle of the dangers of time traveling in R
In this talk, Malcolm Barrett (who created our package development course) digs into one of R's quietly frustrating problems: you set up a project, it works perfectly, and then months later a package update breaks everything, or a collaborator on different package versions gets different results. He explains why restoring R package environments is so tricky and walks through the tools that help, from improved {renv} workflows and system dependency management to alternatives like Posit Package Manager, Docker, and rv, drawing lessons from Python's uv along the way. If you've ever come back to old code and watched it fall apart, this is a great introduction to keeping your environments reproducible over time.
Working Smarter in R: Tips, Tricks & Real-World Lessons
This R-Ladies+ Remote session brings together a lineup of talented R users to share the practical habits that make their day-to-day work smoother. Topics range across productivity tips and workflows, organizing projects and analysis files, wrangling messy real-world data, data visualization and communication, debugging strategies and common pitfalls, and writing reusable, robust code. It's the kind of session where you're almost guaranteed to pick up a trick or two you can put to use right away. Check out the video description for the full rundown of speakers and topics.
Migrating from Pagedown to Typst
Joseph Barbier (one of our consultants) makes the case for moving your PDF reports from {pagedown} to Typst, a modern typesetting system built for PDF creation. The headline benefit is speed: in his testing, Typst rendered a 12-page document about 16.5 times faster than pagedown, and the syntax is far more intuitive than wrestling with CSS. He lays out a clear migration path, converting your .Rmd files to .qmd, switching the output format, dropping the CSS files, and rewriting custom components as Typst functions with much less code. It's something we've leaned into a lot at R for the Rest of Us, and this is a great overview if you're considering the switch yourself.
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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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