Accessing author metadata in shortcodes

[Nenuial]

I'm trying to access the author information in a shortcode and I can't find a way to access it. I think it has to do with the changes the author lua filter does to the metadata, but I might be mistaken.

My document has the following metadata :

---
date: 2022-09-01
author: John Doe
format: html
---

{{< doc-source >}}

I've tried dumping the meta["author"] variable but all I get is WARNING: Unsupported type 'List' for key author and <empty table>. I've also tried a number of combinations using meta["author.something"] including name, name.literal, etc.

Here's what my short shortcode code looks like for now:

return {
  ["doc-source"] = function(args, kwargs, meta)
    quarto.utils.dump(meta["author"])

    return nil
  end
}

Any pointers on how I could proceed to get the necessary information?

[dragonstyle]

The safest way should be to access meta['authors'] which should be present with a normalized schema described here (since we're normalizing the author into the authors key):

https://quarto.org/docs/journals/authors.html

Using this rather than access the author key directly will give you the benefit of the author normalization that we do, ensuring that no matter how the user writes the author, you're able to access it consistently / predictably.

Does this work?

return {
  ["doc-source"] = function(args, kwargs, meta)
    quarto.utils.dump(meta["authors"])

    return nil
  end
}

[Nenuial]

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm afraid this doesn't work either.

I get this output:

<empty table>
WARNING: Unsupported type 'List' for key authors

[dragonstyle]

You are completely correct- we were doing some normalization to the metadata for shortcodes that didn't properly handle lists. I've fixed this and the fix should be in the next pre-release (1.2.95) available here: https://quarto.org/docs/download/prerelease.html

Thanks for reporting this!

[Nenuial]

Works great! Thanks for the fix.