Feature: highlight/bold specific author name in bibliography

[michaelaye]

Problem

A very common academic need — on CVs, personal websites, and grant applications — is to bold or highlight one's own name in a rendered bibliography. There is currently no built-in way to do this in Quarto.

CSL doesn't support per-entry author highlighting, so users are forced to write post-citeproc Lua filters that parse the rendered AST and pattern-match author names. This is fragile because:

• Name tokenization varies by CSL style (initials vs full names, surname-first vs given-name-first)
• The refs div is generated by citeproc after user Lua filters run, requiring citeproc: false + pandoc.utils.citeproc(doc) workarounds
• Every user re-implements the same logic (the canonical pandoc-citeproc gist by @tarleb is archived and incompatible with modern Pandoc)

Proposed solution

A YAML metadata key that tells citeproc to wrap matching author names in pandoc.Strong (or a configurable inline element) before rendering:

bibliography: refs.bib
highlight-authors:
  - family: Aye
    given: "Klaus.Michael|K.*"

This would match against the CSL JSON author field before citeproc formats the entry, so it works regardless of CSL style.

Alternatives considered

• Post-citeproc Lua filter (current workaround; fragile, per-user)
• Custom CSL style (CSL spec doesn't support this)
• JavaScript post-processing (loses SSG benefits)

[michaelaye]

let me know if you want a working Lua filter code.

[mcanouil]

For reference, existing extensions working with citations/bibliography:

• https://github.com/bcdavasconcelos/citetools
• https://github.com/dialoa/recursive-citeproc
• https://github.com/pandoc-ext/multibib
• https://github.com/pandoc-ext/section-bibliographies

[michaelaye]

I created https://github.com/michaelaye/highlight-author, but am proposing to have it included into citetools (no commits since 2023 though): bcdavasconcelos/citetools#4