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‘trunc(<Date>, *)’ now supports ‘units = "months"’ or ‘"years"’ for consistency with the ‘POSIXt’ method, thanks to Dirk Eddelbuettel's proposal in PR#18099.
The HTML help system has several new features: LaTeX-like math can be typeset using either KaTeX or MathJax, usage and example code is highlighted using Prism, and for dynamic help the output of examples and demos can be shown within the browser if the ‘knitr’ package is installed. These features can be disabled by setting the environment variable ‘_R_HELP_ENABLE_ENHANCED_HTML_’ to a false value.
The ‘grid’ package now allows the user to specify a “vector” of pattern fills. The ‘fill’ argument to ‘gpar()’ accepts a list of gradients and/or patterns and the functions ‘linearGradient()’, ‘radialGradient()’, and ‘pattern()’ have a new ‘group’ argument.
Points grobs (data symbols) can now also have a pattern fill.
The ‘grobCoords()’ function now returns a more informative and complex result.
‘Rtools42’ by default uses the Windows security features ASLR and DEP; hence CRAN builds of R and packages also do.
‘R.version’ gains a new field ‘crt’ (only on Windows) to denote the C runtime. The value is ‘"ucrt"’.
‘Rtools42’ includes an unpatched Msys2 build of GNU ‘tar’. Paths including drive letters can be made to work by adding ‘--force-local’ to environment variable ‘TAR_OPTIONS’. (‘Rtools40’ and earlier included a patched version which defaulted to this option.)
The clipboard connection now works also with text in other than the current native encoding (PR#18267, with Hiroaki Yutani). Text is always pasted to the clipboard in UTF16-LE and the ‘encoding’ argument is ignored.
Improved determination the correct translation domain in non-base packages, addressing the combination of PR#18092 and PR#17998 (‘#c6’) with reports and _augmented_ patch #2904 by Suharto Anggono.
Note that ‘"R-base"’ is no longer the default domain e.g., for top-level calls to ‘gettext()’; rather translation needs explicit ‘domain = *’ specification in such cases.
‘remove.packages()’ no longer tries to uninstall ‘Priority: base’ packages, thanks to a report and suggestions by Colin Fay in PR#18227.
‘R CMD Sweave --clean’ no longer removes pre-existing files or subdirectories (PR#18242).
The ‘quartz()’ device no longer splits polylines into subpaths. That has caused narrowly-spaced lines with many points to always look solid even when dashed line type was used due to dash phase restarts.
Not strictly fixing a bug, ‘format()’ing and ‘print()’ing of non-finite ‘Date’ and ‘POSIXt’ values ‘NaN’ and +/-‘Inf’ no longer show as ‘NA’ but the respective string, e.g., ‘Inf’, for consistency with numeric vector's behaviour, fulfilling the wish of PR#18308.