refer to author information from metadata

[anielsen001]

Description

I'm trying to find an easy way to refer to author by id from the meta data for forming the author section of a document. For a project, I'd like to define the author metadata in a yaml and just list the authors for a particular document by their id's.

Something like this is a quarto yaml file:

author: 
  - id: jd
    name: John Doe
    email: [email protected]
  - id: fb
    name: foo bar
    email: [email protected]

and then referred like this in a document:

author:
    - ref: 
      - jd
      - fb

The documentation does not say this is possible and it doesn't work, is there any sort of work around that people have used in this situation?

[cderv]

Let me clarify to see if I understand.

• You would like to define all authors globally to the project in _quarto.yml
• However, for some document, you would like to only show for this specific document a subset of those authors, and you would like to refers to them by and id from the global configuration

Is that what you meant ?

[anielsen001]

Yes, that's what I'm trying to do. I'd like to define a global list of authors will their full metadata and then just refer to that list on a per document basis.

I believe I can refer to authors by id for funding, but can see how to do it generally.

[cderv]

This seems an interesting use case !

I don't think we have that built in, but it seems possible to use Lua filters through an extension to subset the normalized author meta to be inserted in a document. Some resources if you want to try something:

• https://quarto.org/docs/journals/authors.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/filters.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua-api.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua.html

Though having that build-in is an interesting idea !

@dragonstyle what do you think about this feature request ?

[dragonstyle]

Definitely a more advanced use case but something we could ultimately support.

• It will be a little tricky as we'll need to defer merging author metadata from the project with the document so the normalizer has a chance to filter authors and resolve the authors by reference. There is some thinking to do about the correct way to merge and process document and project level authors (e.g. document authors currently override the project authors, but this would require a sort of 'merge' of them).

• Alternatively, we could do something like introduce a new key that filters the authors (e.g. author-refs or some such) to allow the author normalization to proceed and then apply filtering.

• Long run, it would be good for this to be built in as we'd like to filter all the normalized datastructures (e.g. by-author, by-affiliation) to ensure proper support in templates and extensions.

Something we'd have to think a little about but could definitely do a in future release!

[mcanouil]

(changing this thread to feature requests)

[anielsen001]

This seems an interesting use case !

I don't think we have that built in, but it seems possible to use Lua filters through an extension to subset the normalized author meta to be inserted in a document. Some resources if you want to try something:

• https://quarto.org/docs/journals/authors.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/filters.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua-api.html
• https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/lua.html

Though having that build-in is an interesting idea !

@dragonstyle what do you think about this feature request ?

Thank you for sharing these resources. I've been poking around lua at the edges and looking for a reason to learn a bit more, so I'll try my hand at an extension.