RECENT CHANGES to the 'zipfR' package:

Upcoming:

  - posterior distribution functions using LNRE models as a Bayesian prior,
    with type density postdlnre(), log-transformed density postldlnre(), as well as
    cumulative probability postplnre() and quantiles postqlnre() for selected models
  - parallelization of lnre.bootstrap(), using fork on Unix-like platforms or with
    a properly initialized snow cluster
  - Good-Turing estimates with gtlnre()

Version 0.7:

  - 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