Support gender in author metadata?

[knuesel]

Following #1309 quarto uses a neutral form for the author text in French. Maybe the author metadata could also support a "gender", so that translations can use the appropriate male/female/neutral form?

For example

---
title: Titre
author:
  name: Jane Doe
  gender: female
lang: fr
---

could produce a title block with "Autrice: Jane Doe" (and "Auteur: Jane Doe" in case of gender: male) instead of the current "Auteur·rice: Jane Doe".

I think "auteur·rice" is nice when the gender is not known or when there are several authors of different gender, but when the gender is known it's rather weird... (for readers unfamiliar with French, an English equivalent would be to write "(Wo)man who wrote this: Jane Doe").

For example if I put my name on a document for my students, of course I know my gender and it seems impersonal and strange to write "auteur·rice".

[mcanouil]

Even if the field itself is I think a good idea to add.
What you want to do using that field would require to be limited to a list of items (not everyone will recognise themselves in "male", "female" or "neutral"), then this list would need to be matched with the possible translations.

Instead, I would suggest you to simply overwrite the translation either in your document header or in _quarto.yml:

language: 
  title-block-author-single: "Auteur"

[knuesel]

If it helps, the field could be named language-gender instead of gender since the point is not to classify people but to let them choose language forms.

The field could be open in which values are accepted. Users could then extend the translation data if they want to use an uncommon value. There could be a recommendation for translations to support at least "male", "female" and "unspecified"¹ where it makes sense.

There are of course many more gender "values" in use, in particular for pronouns (see e.g. https://uwm.edu/lgbtrc/support/gender-pronouns/) but maybe for quarto's purpose that's not very relevant? I mean for example I'm not aware of another form than "auteur" and "autrice" or the alternative "auteure". For language forms that are not well known it seems reasonable to let the user define it themselves.

Good point with title-block-author-single. But it feels to me this should be handled by the translations, at least for the common cases. It feels cumbersome to have to fix this manually (especially when writing in different languages, having to maintain fixes for each).

Footnotes

1. "unspecified" might be better than "neutral"? ↩

[mcanouil]

It feels cumbersome to have to fix this manually (especially when writing in different languages, having to maintain fixes for each).

Would you not be manually fixing it by having to use/set a gender option? How this would be any different than setting the "translation" to whatever you like without any limitations? 🤔

But it feels to me this should be handled by the translations

Beside the pluralisation, the translations are not scripts. They are simple text that are used at some places depending on lang which actually only tell Quarto the file to use, not which text translation.

[knuesel]

Would you not be manually fixing it by having to use/set a gender option? How this would be any different than setting the "translation" to whatever you like without any limitations? 🤔

I don't mind defining gender to give the system the data it needs to generate the correct output in any language, it makes sense.

Using language:\n title-block-author-single: ... to override the default behavior feels like a hack, and is not very practical. For example

• I must remember to fiddle with the language block and adapt it when the list of author changes.

  "Here's a _quarto.yml you can use for this report but don't forget to adapt title-block-author-single under language!

  "I have a coauthor now, I must set title-block-author-plural."

  "A third coauthor of different gender? Don't forget to adapt title-block-author-plural!"

• I often write in English, French and German, so I have to find the appropriate words in each language and remember to set the language block appropriately depending on the document's language.

• I often generate French and German from the same source file. Having to take care of title-block-author-XXX in this context is not making things easier... (Probably something can be done with project profiles in the future quarto 1.2, but that's increasing the whole project's complexity just for this).

All these could be handled properly and automatically by quarto... it just needs this field in author metadata :-)

Beside the pluralisation, the translations are not scripts. They are simple text that are used at some places depending on lang which actually only tell Quarto the file to use, not which text translation.

Why not handle it the same way as singular/plural? On top of-single and -plural (which could still be used for unspecified or mixed gender) the translation file could add optionally -single-m, -single-f, -plural-m, plural-f, where it makes sense.

[mcanouil]

it just needs this field in author metadata :-)

No, it's not that simple.
Adding the new field won't change anything. A new step in the pre-processing step is required. As I said YAML is not a programming/scripting language.

To be clear and as I said at the beginning, a gender field makes sense to me and why not add some pre-processing along with it, but the expected output and use case have to be clear to ensure a smooth and useful implementation by Quarto team if they agree with it.

[knuesel]

Ah I meant that the gender field is the only thing quarto needs from the user, to properly handle situations with changing lists of authors and different languages. It's true that some logic will be required in quarto to make use of this field, but that's nothing special: many YAML keys require some logic (title-block-author-plural, date, execute: cache, keep-tex just to give a few examples).

[mcanouil]

FYI @dragonstyle as you opened few issues about the author schema.

[jawadakhan97]

Hello, I was looking for a pronoun option as well for a blog I am making. I wanted to add it to the yaml in the .qmd preceeding the document body.

something like

---
title: "Paradise Lost"
author: "John Milton"
author-pronouns: "he / him"
categories:
  - Epic Poetry
  - Blank Verse
  - Religious Fiction
  - Christian Mythology
---

or for an extended author section

---
title: "Paradise Lost"
author: 
  name: "John Milton"
  pronouns: "he / him"
  gender: "man"
categories:
  - Epic Poetry
  - Blank Verse
  - Religious Fiction
  - Christian Mythology
---

Thanks for the work! Really liking quarto a ton

[mcanouil]

I opened an issue to track this:

• Support gender/pronouns in author metadata? #8476