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Feature: highlight/bold a specific author name in bibliography entries #4

@michaelaye

Description

@michaelaye

Use case

A common need in academic documents — CVs, grant proposals, tenure packets, lab group pages — is to visually highlight a specific author's name in bibliography entries. CSL and Pandoc's citeproc don't support this natively.

Since citetools already owns the post-citeproc bibliography processing pipeline (multiple bibliographies, cite-field extraction, backlinks), author highlighting seems like a natural addition.

Proposed behavior

A new metadata key, e.g.:

highlight-author:
  name: "Aye"
  style: bold   # bold | italic | underline | <css-class>

Or shorthand: highlight-author: "Aye" (defaults to bold).

The filter would walk the #refs div after citeproc and wrap matching author name spans in the appropriate inline element (Strong, Emph, Underline, or Span with a CSS class).

What it needs to handle

Citation styles produce author names in several formats:

  • Surname-first: Aye, K.-M., Aye, Klaus Michael
  • Given-name-first: K.-M. Aye, Klaus-Michael Aye
  • Initials only: K. M. Aye

The highlighting should cover the full name span (surname + given names), not just the surname in isolation.

Existing implementation

I've published a standalone Quarto extension that does this: highlight-author. It's a single Lua filter (~170 lines) that calls pandoc.utils.citeproc(doc) internally and walks the refs div — the same pattern citetools uses.

I'd be happy to contribute a PR adapting this into citetools if you're interested. The core logic is self-contained and could plug into the existing filter pipeline.

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