RECENT CHANGES to the 'zipfR' package:

Development version:

Version 0.6-70:

  - parallelization of lnre.bootstrap(), using forked processed on Unix-like platforms
    or with a properly initialized snow cluster (based on the 'parallel' package)
  - bootstrapped confidence intervals in lnre() are speeded up substantially
  - additional productivity measures and some other improvements to productivity.measures()
  - lnre.productivity.measures() computes approximate expectations for samples from LNRE
    population or estimates sampling distribution by parametric bootstrapping
  - plot.tfl() now also plots relative frequencies (pmw) for comparison across 
    different sample sizes, as well as population distributions described by LNRE models
  - plot method (plot.lnre) for LNRE models, showing either the log-transformed type
    density function or the distribution function for a quick visualisation
  - all plot methods accept list of objects in first argument to avoid do.call() trickery,
    but need to be called explicitly rather than via method dispatch in this case 
  - lnre() now allows a user-defined cost function in parameter estimation (e.g to fit
    against Zipf ranking = top part of TFL, or to set parameters based on implicit constraints)
  - bug fix: tfl2spc() no longer includes types with f = 0 in frequency spectrum, and
    spc() now complains in such cases
  - new default colour scheme and line styles

Version 0.6-66:

  - default minimization algorithm changed to "Nelder-Mead", since "Custom" often
    failed to converge on problematic data sets
  - new default cost function "gof" based on the multivariate chi-squared statistic,
    which is closely related to maximum likelihood estimation
  - parameter optimization now performs multiple runs with different random start
    values by default, improving robustness of the parameter estimation
  - lnre.bootstrap() implements parametric bootstrapping from an LNRE model, and
    the function bootstrap.confint() provides robust estimates of confidence limits
  - rlnre() can directly generate type-frequency lists instead of token vectors, 
    which is much more efficient for large samples (and essential for large-scale
    bootstrapping experiments)
  - bootstrapped confidence intervals for model parameters can be obtained with
    confint() applied to an LNRE model object with bootstrap replicates
  - compute various productivity measures from observed frequency spectrum,
    type-frequency list, vocabulary growth curve or token vector
  - merge() method for two or more type frequency lists
  - new example data sets from Evert & Luedeling (2001) and Baayen (2001)

Version 0.6-10

  - maintenance release for compatibility with new CRAN checks and restrictions
  - zipfR plotting utilities (zipfR.begin.plot, zipfR.end.plot, etc.) are deprecated;
    device="x11" and device="quartz" now both open the default device with dev.new(),
    which is not guaranteed to be an on-screen device
  - update stale URLs and maintainer e-mail addresses

Version 0.6-8

  - zipfR tutorial has been rewritten as genuine package vignette
  - write.tfl() and read.tfl() now allow character encoding of the disk file to be
    declared; read.tfl() safely reads type strings containing quotes
  
Version 0.6-6

  - interim release for compliance with new, stricter CRAN requirements
  - Zipf-ranking plots for type-frequency lists (of class "tfl")
  - file I/O automatically compresses/decompresses ".gz" files in functions
    read.tfl(), read.spc(), read.vgc(), write.tfl(), write.spc(), write.vgc()
  - dropped support for very old R versions (before 2.3.1 or so),
    where read.delim() does not accept comment.char= option; now requires 2.10.1+
  - removed zipfR.legend() function since standard legend() now offers the same
    convenient placement options
  - added citation details (file inst/CITATION), which can be displayed with
    citation(package="zipfR")
  - upgraded to GPL v3

Version 0.6-5

  - moved development to SVN repository on R-Forge

Version 0.6-4

  - various bug fixes and minor improvements
  - improved robustness and tolerance for rounding errors in expected frequency spectra

Version 0.6-2

  - added function read.multiple.objects to do just that

Version 0.6-1

  - bugfix: read.vgc() died on input files without at least a V1 column

Version 0.6-0

  - first public release on CRAN
  - improved parameter estimation, can be fine-tuned by users 
    with choice of cost functions and minimization algorithms
  - default settings work well for most data sets
  - minor bug fixes and improved documentation
  - updated version of tutorial


Version 0.5-0

  - first beta release of the zipfR toolkit