Lua API - expose authors / affiliation normalization function

The idea came up for Quarto Extension and custom format while looking at

• https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions/12876#discussioncomment-13356473

The usage is to have a way to separate list of authors from list of reviewers.

Our Authors & Affiliations normalization handles multiple authors and roles, but Pandoc's template does not have a mechanism to fill-in template based on something like $if(roles == "editing")$.

So be able to have several HTML divs in title-block for different authors' roles, currently this should be done using a Lua filter to process the metadata, normalize it, and create multiple variable to use in the template.

Another way is to use another YAML like

secondary-authors:
  - name: Stephen McGregor
    orcid: 0000-0001-6560-5586
    email: semcgregor@hotmail.com
    url: https://www.tenfive.ai

But it can't be used with the _title-meta-author.html partial because it is not normalized metadata.

So YAML would need to be

 secondary-authors:
  - name: 
      literal: Stephen McGregor
    orcid: 0000-0001-6560-5587
    email: semcgregor@hotmail.com
    url: https://www.tenfive.ai

So I am wondering if a quarto.author in API could be a good idea to allow a custom format to duplicate author logic.

Highly hypothetical and probably not trivial work but at least the idea is now out there. We link to potential use case and decide if this could be helpful or not.

Start with the linked Quarto Extension discussion and this issue's proposed use cases for separating authors and reviewers. Review how Authors & Affiliations normalization is currently exposed, then determine whether a quarto.author API is needed and what its scope should be; done means an agreed design or decision on whether to pursue it.