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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

ximage 0.1.0

CRAN release: 2026-07-21

  • New vignette “Why ximage” frames the package motivation: raster order versus image(), rasterImage() as the honest primitive, GDAL flat reads and the dimension guess, and nativeRaster as the fast destination for colour imagery.

  • Bare atomic vectors (numeric, integer, raw, character) with no dim and no known attributes now get a guessed dimension by integer-division detection of the length, choosing the most nearly square factorization (landscape preferred) and assuming raster scanline order, i.e. flat output from GDAL readers such as vapour::gdal_raster_data() or gdalraster::read_ds(), built as matrix(x, ncol = NC, byrow = TRUE) (column-major R data needs dim(x) <- c(NR, NC) instead). A message reports the guess and the candidate shapes from 1xN through Nx1, in GDAL dimension order (ncol x nrow). Raw vectors also consider 3-plane (RGB) and 4-plane (RGBA) scanline pixel-interleaved interpretations; numeric data never gets a plane interpretation by default. Vectors longer than getOption("ximage.guess_max", 2^24) error unless force = TRUE or the dimension is set explicitly.

  • New function xtext() draws matrix values as labels at cell centres, in the same raster-order layout used by ximage() (thanks to a draft in issue #22). Supports vapour and gdalraster reader-output lists.

  • New vignette “Array orientation: raster order and the R matrix” explains the raster-order convention, the byrow = TRUE and as.vector(t(m)) round trip, multi-band aperm() recipes, and the cell-edge extent convention (#14).

  • Now support raw output of fastpng.

  • Now support {gdalraster} output of read_ds(, as_list = TRUE) or raw numeric, thanks to Chris Toney.

  • ximage() now handles breaks argument to go with col (for numeric input).

  • image() now works with list output from gdalnara (same as gdal_raster_image but with nativeRaster).

  • Added suport for xcontour() for the output output of gdal_raster_data() in {vapour}.

  • ximage() can now plot sf::gdal_read objects.

  • Fixed default extent for an array/matrix, it was transposed (!).

  • ximage now does what imfun in whatarelief did, i.e. with the output of gdal_raster_data, gdal_raster_dsn, gdal_raster_image do the obvious plot.

  • Add ‘mesh_plot’ mode to ximage(), not fully implemented.

  • Increase the default colour classes, 12 -> 96.

  • Support ‘raster’ class as per as.raster.

  • Added xcontour and xrect functions.