using author information from a separate file

[nithinmkp]

Description

I want to use the author information from a separate file so that i can share the author information across other type of documents. I am trying to make use of var short code. But it is throwing error.

my _var.yml

author: 
  - name: Nithin.M
    orcid: 0000-0002-0939-7927
    affiliations:
      - id: kgp
        number: 1
        name: IIT Kharagpur
        department: Department of Humanities and Social Sciences
        group: Research Scholar
    email: write2nithinm@iitkgp.ac.in

My intended use say in a test.qmd

---
title: some title
author : {{ < var author > }}
---

Is there something I am doing wrong?

[mcanouil]

Shortcodes are not for objects.

Why not use the inheritance from _quarto.yml and _metadata.yml? And/or use metadata-files to use an external YAML?

[nithinmkp]

Sure. I just want to declutter the .qmd files and also use across documents. Could you show me an example?

[mcanouil]

an example about what?

metadata-files:
  - my-author.yml

Everything else is in the documentation.

[nithinmkp]

Thanks. That was hellfpul

[mcanouil]

Again, it's all in the documentation in "projects basics":

• https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#metadata-merging
• https://quarto.org/docs/projects/quarto-projects.html#metadata-includes

I suggest to read the "basics" and the "get started" pages to get a better overview of Quarto's features.

[nithinmkp]

I had a read and found out that if i need to access author 1, i could use {{< meta author.1 >}}. But I could not find out how to access email of author 1 or department in affiliation

tried something like this {{< meta author.1.\\-email >}}

[mcanouil]

The documentation (https://quarto.org/docs/authoring/variables.html#meta ) says:

You can also index into an array with the dot (.) delimiter. For example, to extract the first in the array of authors

And

To reference a field that contains a dot (.), escape the dot with a double backslash (\). For example, to get field.with.dots

So why use/try \\-?

Here you are using author and trying to take the first value of it, but did you look at what author is and if it contains what you need/want?

• https://quarto.org/docs/journals/authors.html#author-metadata

The author metadata key receives a simple list of names [...]

The authors metadata key contains the normalized author data structure. Affiliations are referenced (rather than placed inline), so this typically shouldn’t be used by templates to output author data. The order the authors appear in the metadata will be preserved.

Thus if I want to get the url field of an author, based on the above, I need to use the following for the first author listed in the YAML: {< meta authors.1.url >}}