Changelog • lpanda

lpanda (development version)

Improved handling of non-ASCII characters in plot text to avoid rare text conversion issues on some platforms.

CRAN release: 2025-11-29

Renamed sample datasets used for testing:
- sample_different_varnames (formerly sample_diff_varnames).
- sample_no_switching (formerly sample_no_crossing).

plot_continuity() gains a new argument, show_candidate_networks. It adds an additional bottom panel visualising candidate network snapshots for each selected election. The snapshots highlight candidates running in the focal election, show earlier candidates as smaller background nodes, and reflect group affiliations (e.g., parties or cores) through node colours and candidate lists through group boundaries around the nodes.

Added municipalities:
- Bublava_SO_cz
- Cernosice_PZ_cz
- Dasnice_SO_cz
- Horomerice_PZ_cz
- Hradce_CB_cz
- Kamenna_CB_cz
- Nebanice_CH_cz
- Potucky_KV_cz
- Prameny_CH_cz
- Roztoky_PZ_cz
New sample dataset for testing:
- sample_no_pluralism - variant of sample_data with only one candidate list per election.

plot_continuity() no longer requires grouping information (e.g., parties) when marking a specific candidate via mark = c("candidate", "<name>"). The function now highlights the candidate and their lists even in ungrouped datasets, avoiding unnecessary community detection.

Fixed crashes and encoding issues on non-UTF-8 systems caused by data containing diacritics.
- Added automatic ASCII fallback for non-UTF-8 systems and locales.
- plot_continuity() now detects the UTF-8 capability of the current graphics device. It automatically switches to ASCII mode when running in non-interactive or CI environments, or when the device cannot render UTF-8.
- Added global options:
  - lpanda.text_encoding — "auto" (default) | "utf8" | "ascii"
  - lpanda.plot_family — "sans" (default)
  - lpanda.force_ascii — FALSE (default)
- Text encoding can also be specified as a text_encoding argument via ... in plotting functions.
plot_continuity() now properly resets the graphics layout to prevent occasional overlapping plots.

help("lpanda") / ?lpanda now provide basic package information, including an overview of the basic workflow, main functions, datasets, and references.
Added pkgdown website: https://localpolitics.github.io/lpanda/.
Updated documentation for municipalities and sample datasets.

CRAN release: 2025-09-01

plot_continuity() now always restores graphical parameters (even if an error occurs).

prepare_network_data() - creates network edgelists and node attributes for candidates, lists, continuity, parties, cores and elections.
plot_continuity() - visualizes the continuity of candidate lists across elections as a time-based diagram using igraph package.

Municipalities:
- Doubice_DC_cz
- Jilove_DC_cz
Example data:
- sample_data
Variants for tests:
- sample_diff_varnames
- sample_binary_values
- sample_no_continuity
- sample_no_crossing