Note to self: please come back to this post with links on R, its packages and related resources.

Grammar of graphics

• https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2
• https://exts.ggplot2.tidyverse.org/gallery community-maintained list of extensions

Integration with reference manager Zotero

• https://github.com/oeysan/c2z (manipulate your Zotero collections, items from R; can be integrated with other tools such as cronR, mailR, or even HomeAssistant)

PDF tools

• https://ropensci.org/blog/2016/03/01/pdftools-and-jeroen (pdftools - A fast and portable PDF extractor)

Integration with GPG

• https://ropensci.org/technotes/2016/10/19/gpg-release (Encryption and Digital Signatures in R using GPG)

Web scraping

• https://blog.rsquaredacademy.com/web-scraping Introduction to web scraping with rvest, 2019
• https://www.brodrigues.co/blog/2018-11-01-nethack Scraping with rvest and building a data package, 2018
• My own package periodicdata uses rvest to create a data package

Email from R

• https://github.com/rstudio/blastula send great-looking HTML email messages from R
• https://github.com/datawookie/emayili send email messages from R
• https://github.com/rpremraj/mailR utility to send emails from R

Integration with MS Office (yes, yes, I know...)

• https://ardata-fr.github.io/officeverse
• https://github.com/davidgohel/officer
• https://github.com/davidgohel/flextable

Interfacing with Google Docs

• https://googlesheets4.tidyverse.org

Resources

• https://emilyriederer.netlify.app/post/team-of-packages (post of Emily Riederer's rstudio::global 2020 talk)
• https://indrajeetpatil.github.io/awesome-r-pkgtools Awesome R Package Development Tools, compiled by Indrajeet Patil, 2024
• https://win-vector.com/2017/02/05/evolving-r-tools-and-practices John Mount, 2017
• https://github.com/nanxstats/awesome-shiny-extensions
• https://zenodo.org/record/7023492#.YwnwHuxBxhH R from Zero to Hero, slides from talk by Batool Almarzouq (in Arabic)

Tools to consider

• https://alexioannides.com/2016/11/02/asynchronous-and-distributed-programming-in-r-with-the-future-package (the futures package: distributed computation, non-blocking async input/output, and more)
• https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/geomtextpath/vignettes/geomtextpath.html

This is just a quick-and-dirty one-liner. I was compiling beamer slides, and for some reason the TikZ-generated PDF figures contained two pages under some circumstances. This way we can quickly see whether just some PDF files or all of them suffered a problem:

$ find figure/ -type f -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftk "{}" dump_data \; | grep NumberOfPages | awk '{print $2}'
1
1
1
1
1
1

(in this case they were all one page long).

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14704274/how-to-write-shell-script-for-finding-number-of-pages-in-pdf

I would like to have a PDF viewer that lets me click a button (or press a key) to move backwards in the PDF file's git history. In effect, git checkout <commit> file.pdf but automatically moving back in the commit history on each keypress.

Combined with something like the overview mode of pdfpc, that could make for a very efficient way to glance through the history of a PDF file, such as a thesis or a beamer presentation.

So far I have not found any PDF viewer software with something akin to that.
Maybe I should just open the PDF in VSCodium and use the built-in git support? Would that provide something similar?

This little tool by Andrew Baumann is awesome for collating and working with highlights in PDF files.

It is a pip module, so easily installed, and works by producing Markdown (default) or JSON text file with the extracted annotations.

For example, to extract all annotations and highlight into a markdown file:

pdfannots -o annots.md iupac_gold_book.pdf

The libpoppler-utils package contains the tool pdfsig that does just this.

$ apt install libpoppler-utils
$ pdfsig file.pdf
Internal Error (0): couldn't find default Firefox Folder
Digital Signature Info of: file.pdf
Signature #1:
  - Signer Certificate Common Name: Donald Duck
  - Signer full Distinguished Name: C=SE,E=donald.duck@stackoverflow.com,O=Uppsala universitet,CN=Donald Duck
  - Signing Time: Oct 10 2021 15:12:20
  - Signing Hash Algorithm: SHA-256
  - Signature Type: adbe.pkcs7.detached
  - Signed Ranges: [0 - 132117], [137169 - 143786]
  - Total document signed
  - Signature Validation: Signature is Valid.
  - Certificate Validation: Certificate issuer is unknown.

The complaint about Firefox folder goes away if you simply create the empty folder ~/.mozilla/firefox.

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41301138/how-to-check-if-a-pdf-has-any-kind-of-digital-signature/67331180
• https://askubuntu.com/questions/226257/how-can-i-validate-a-pdfs-digital-signature-with-evince
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=926404
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=924050

RSS-Bridge

RSS-Bridge is a PHP project capable of generating RSS/Atom feeds for a multitude of sources. You self-host it on your own webserver or run it in stand-alone CLI mode.

Supports a long list of content sources (aka bridges).

• List of public RSS Bridge instances

RSSHub

RSSHub (over 17k stars on Github, wow!). It even has a browser extension and a mobile app. Docs.
Via reddit

"Kill the Newsletter!"

Kill the Newsletter!, by Leandro Facchinetti. Converts email newsletters into Atom feeds.
You can use the hosted service kindly offered by its creator, or self-host it yourself.
Via reddit.

FiveFilters

Web service that lets you create RSS feeds for any web sites that don't support it natively, among other useful content-related services. Offers a free tier, no account necessary. Paying customers also get access to the code and the ability to self-host the service (FiveFilters provide Puppet scripts).
FiveFilters maintains an open-source repo with site-specific content extraction rules that is widely used.

RSS Anything

Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS Feed.
Uses Diffbot's Extract API to transform lists of links on websites into an RSS feed.

• https://github.com/diffbot/rss-anything

PolitePol

PolitePol is a web service where you can create RSS feed for any page on the internet using
interactive XPath selection. Create either XML or JSON feeds.
Service is not FOSS; pricing appears to depend on number of feeds. Unless you sign up the service is quite hobbled (feed lifetime 14 days, and feed never updates).

Feed43

Web service that lets you create RSS feeds for any web sites that don't support it natively. Offers a free plan, with or without first registering an account, but the code behind the service is proprietary.

RSS Box

RSS Box by Stefan Sundin, supports:

• Twitter (but Nitter may be better, also see this excellent guide by FiveFilters)
• Youtube (YT actually offers RSS feed per channel, also consider Invidious)
• Vimeo
• Instagram (another option is Bibliogram)
• Periscope
• SoundCloud
• Mixcloud
• Twitch
• Speedrun
• Dailymotion
• Imgur
• SVT Play

Feed me up, Scotty!

Feed me up, Scotty!, by Vincent Tunru. Hat-tip to Marie Dubremetz.

Notifier

Notifier, by Kirill Maltsev.
Can generate RSS feeds from emails and Telegram channels.
Offers up to 100 notifications per month for free. For 4 €/month you could receive up to 20,000 notifications.
Via kickscondor.

Echo (RSS cross poster)

• https://echo.rknight.me

Echo is a node script that you can self-host to post new items from an RSS feed to services such as Mastodon.
The author also offers a hosted version at https://echofeed.app.

Free and open source PDF readers. A list by the FSFE.