posit::glimpse() Newsletter – April 2026

Welcome to posit::glimpse(), our roundup of the most important news for Posit’s community! If you are interested in previous editions, please find them here. Let’s jump into the latest and greatest.

Registration for posit::conf(2026) is now open!

Registration is officially open for posit::conf(2026)! Join the global data community in Houston or tune in online from September 14–16. Register (for in person or virtual) today.

All workshops will be held on September 14, 2026, with in-person sessions in Houston, TX and virtual options for global attendees. Topics include leveling up Quarto, programming with LLMs, modern R workflows, and more. Learn about the workshop offerings here!

Key product updates and new releases

Quarto v1.9

Quarto 1.9 is out! You can get the current release from the download page. It introduces major features for publishing, accessibility, and brand consistency. Learn more in the Quarto 1.9 blog post, or read below for a quick summary:

Publishing and cloud integration

Quarto 1.9 adds direct publishing to Posit Connect Cloud with a free tier for unlimited static documents. The new quarto publish posit-connect-cloud command streamlines deployment.

Accessibility and standards

This release includes experimental PDF/A archival and PDF/UA accessibility compliance for LaTeX and Typst. Alt text from fig-alt now passes through to PDFs for screen reader support, videos support accessibility labels via aria-label, and privacy-focused defaults include opt-in cookie consent.

Typst enhancements

Book projects can now render to Typst with the bundled orange-book extension. Article layouts support margin content and full-width figures, with custom font options (mathfont, codefont, linestretch) and color customization. Theorem styling offers four appearances: simple, fancy, clouds, and rainbow.

Content and developer tools

List Tables introduce a new bullet syntax for complex table content including code blocks and nested lists. The llms-txt format provides LLM-friendly output for AI-readable website content. Brand synchronization is available via the `quarto use brand` command (GitHub, local, or zip sources), and engine extensions enable Julia and other execution engines as bundled extensions.

Quality of life improvements

Enhanced search includes persistent result highlighting. The new syntax-highlighting option replaces the deprecated highlight-style. This release also adds Plausible Analytics integration and updates dependencies: Pandoc 3.8.3, Typst 0.14.2, esbuild 0.25.10, Deno 2.4.5, and Mermaid 11.12.0.

orbital v0.5.0

orbital is a package that deploys tidymodels workflows directly into databases by translating fitted models into SQL expressions. Version 0.5.0 adds support for popular boosted tree engines (lightgbm, catboost), decision trees (rpart), and expands prediction types for existing models (mars, multinom_reg, rand_forest).

Major performance improvements include nested case_when() statements that eliminate redundant checks and a separate_trees argument enabling database query parallelization for ensemble models. New splines support brings preprocessing transformations to database deployment. Check out the vignettes on SQL optimization (achieving 10-100x speedups), parallel tree evaluation, and database deployment patterns!

Read more in the orbital 0.5.0 blog post and the accompanying blog post showcasing these new capabilities in a Snowflake database.

Great Docs v0.1

Introducing Great Docs, an easy-to-use documentation site generator for Python packages, powered by Quarto!

• Core documentation features include automatic API reference generation supporting NumPy, Google, and Sphinx docstring formats, user guide support via Quarto markdown files, and 18 built-in recipe guides for common documentation tasks.
• Need it to look snazzy? Great Docs includes built-in dark mode support, custom navbar colors with automatic contrast optimization, logo support with light/dark variants, and much more.
• We know that making your tools work well with AI is crucial. Great Docs helps with automatic generation of llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for AI-readable documentation, creation of SKILL.md files conforming to Agent Skills specifications, and serving skills for agent discovery.

There’s so much packed in this v0.1 release, learn more in the Great Docs v0.1 release notes.

Additional package updates

• renv v1.2.0 introduces parallel installation by default with R (>= 4.0).
• devtools v2.5.0 pivots away from the remotes package and towards pak, and deprecates a lot of tooling that is no longer recommended/used.
• dbplot has been modernized ⚡

Learning and community

Showcases from the community

We absolutely ♥️ it when you tag us on your latest work, and want to share it with everybody we know! Here are a few projects we’ve admired recently:

	Shelby Level created a beautiful Shiny dashboard on Lyme Disease and Climate Change in the United States, complete with value boxes, interactive visualizations, and a multiple tab layout ✨ See the dashboard on her website.
Aurélien Goutsmedt shared the new website for the Political Economy Working Group in Belgium, made with Quarto ✨
	Ever wonder if anyone actually reads those “open-ended” survey comments? They do, if they have the right tools 😉  We’ve learned from quite a few People Analytics Leaders over the past few months at the Data Science Hangout. Most recently, Trevor Fry (Lead Data Analyst, People Insights and Analytics Team at Pinterest) shared how their team transformed their workflow to analyze 30,000+ employee comments using Snowflake and Posit Workbench.

2026 Posit Internships

Posit announced four summer 2026 internship positions (10-12 weeks, starting May 26) across the PyData, tidymodels, Shiny, and Posit Connect teams.

Read more in the 2026 Posit Internships blog post.

Data Science Lab episodes

We’ve been having a blast on the Data Science Lab. It’s a fun space for experimentation and learning about new tools, and you can join us by registering here! Check out some previous session recordings:

• Behind the scenes of tidyverse development: new dplyr functions with Davis Vaughan
• Using R package structure for data science projects with Kylie Ainslie 
• The mall package: using LLMs with data frames in R & Python with Edgar Ruiz

Recreating SEPTA timetables in Python

Ever seen a nifty table and wanted to recreate it using code? That’s exactly what Michael Chow did with the weekend rail schedule table from SEPTA, Philadelphia’s transit agency! See how he did it in the Recreating Septa Transit Timetables in Python blog post.

rainbowR talk recordings

…are now available on YouTube! Check out the rainbowR 2026 playlist, including Hadley Wickham’s keynote, Claude Code for R.

Stay connected

Want more updates like this? Sign up for posit::glimpse() by subscribing to Stories on our subscription page. You can also join us every Tuesday at the Data Science Lab and every Thursday at the Data Science Hangout!

I’m a real person, and I would love to hear any feedback on the newsletter! Find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky, or email me at isabella [dot] velasquez [at] posit.co.