What's New in R

What’s New in R: June 29, 2026

June 29, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a big update to a package for building advanced ggplot2 legends and guides, the highlights from Positron's latest release, and a fun statistical look at how long wars actually last. Let's dive in!‍Symbolic update Teun van den Brand has released version 0.3.0 of {legendry}, his package for building advanced guides and legends in {ggplot2}. The update adds a whole batch of new guides, including guide_legend_manual()...

What’s New in R: June 22, 2026

June 22, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring an argument for why Quarto pairs so well with LLMs, a Quarto extension that saves you from repeating headings across slides, and a package for wrangling nested lists into tibbles. Let's dive in!The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Quarto John Paul Helveston makes the case that Quarto is the ideal format to reach for when you're working with an LLM. Rather than asking a tool like Claude to produce a Word doc or PDF...

What’s New in R: June 15, 2026

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...

What’s New in R: June 8, 2026

June 8, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a package for compositing ggplot graphics into images with perspective and transparency, a video from Posit announcing their new AI tooling for Positron and RStudio, and a practical guide to map projections in R. Let's dive in!{overlay} {overlay}, created by Luis D. Verde Arregoitia, lets you composite {ggplot2} plots, {gt} tables, or syntax-highlighted code snippets onto background images, complete with perspective...

What’s New in R: June 1, 2026

June 1, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a blind taste test that uses R to find the best decaf coffee, an interactive data viewer that upgrades the default View() experience, and a Quarto extension that lets you draw on your slides while presenting. Let's dive in!Using science to find the best decaf Giles Dickenson-Jones runs a double-blind taste test to figure out whether decaf coffee can really hold its own against the caffeinated stuff, and whether...

What’s New in R: May 26, 2026

May 26, 2026

Welcome to this week's edition of What's New in R! This week, we're featuring a look at how Posit arrived at its new AI tooling, a video walkthrough of Posit Assistant in RStudio from Hadley Wickham, and an R package for adding narrative roadmap footers to your Quarto presentations. Let's dive in!2026-03-27 AI Newsletter Sara Altman and Simon Couch trace the path Posit has taken in thinking about AI tools for data science, from early experiments like Shiny Assistant and Databot through to the...

What’s New in R: May 18, 2026

May 18, 2026

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R​! This week, we’re featuring a package for accessing US price indexes in R, a deep dive into atmospheric light simulation for 3D visualizations, and a tool for generating synthetic data to safely share with AI assistants. Let’s dive in!{realtalk} The {realtalk} package, developed by Ben Zipperer at the Economic Policy Institute, provides clean, ready-to-use access to five major US price indexes covering annual, monthly, and quarterly data...

What’s New in R: May 11, 2026

May 11, 2026

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R​! This week, we’re featuring a Claude Code skill for generating alt text for figures in Quarto, a video on building and automating serverless dashboards, and a behind-the-scenes look at how Kieran Healy used Quarto to write his data visualization book. Let’s dive in!Adding alt text to figures in quarto with Claude Code Emil Hvitfeldt demonstrates a workflow for automatically generating alt text for data visualizations in Quarto documents...

What’s New in R: May 4, 2026

May 4, 2026

Welcome to this week’s edition of ​What’s New in R​! This week, we’re featuring an introduction to Posit AI for RStudio, the newly updated second edition of a beloved data visualization book, and a Quarto extension for displaying times in readers’ local time zones. Let’s dive in!Introducing Posit AI Simon P. Couch announces the arrival of Posit AI. It’s a new AI service built into RStudio that brings the kind of AI capabilities Positron users have enjoyed for a while to a much wider audience....