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A general description is here.
The placement of ‘plotmath’ text in the margins of plots done by base graphics now makes the same vertical adjustment as ordinary text, so using ordinary and plotmath text on the same margin line will seem better aligned (but not exactly aligned, since ordinary text has descenders below the baseline and plotmath places them on the baseline). (Related to PR#14537.)
‘iconv()’ has a new argument ‘toRaw’ to handle encodings such as ‘UTF-16’ with embedded nuls (as was possible before the ‘CHARSXP’ cache was introduced).
It will also accept as input the type of list generated with ‘toRaw = TRUE’.
There is a new function ‘Sys.setFileTime()’ to set the time of a file (including a directory). See its help for exactly which times it sets on various OSes.
‘str()’ now displays reference class objects and their fields, rather than treating them as classical S4 classes.
Devices ‘svg()’, ‘cairo_pdf()’ and ‘cairo_ps()’ gain a ‘family’ argument.
On a Unix-alike ‘X11()’ gains a ‘family’ argument. This is one of the ‘x11.options()’ and so can be passed as an argument to the ‘bmp()’, ‘jpeg()’, ‘png()’ and ‘tiff()’ devices.
Analogous changes have been made on Windows, so all built-in R graphics devices now have a ‘family’ argument except ‘pictex()’ (which has no means to change fonts).
There is a new function ‘dev.capabilities()’ to query the capabilities of the current device. The initial set of capabilities are support for semi-transparent colours, rendering and capturing raster images, the locator and for interactive events.
It is no longer allowed to have two vignettes with the same vignette basename (e.g. ‘vig.Rnw’ and ‘vig.Snw’). (Previously one vignette hid the other in the ‘vignette()’ function.)
‘installed.packages()’ now hashes the names of its cache files to avoid very rare problems with excessively long path names. (PR#14669)