highlight-author: A Quarto Extension to Highlight Your Name in Bibliographies

Because every CV, grant proposal, and publication page needs it

quarto
academic
bibliography
open-source
Author

Michael Aye

Published

2026-03-02

If you’ve ever built an academic homepage, a CV, or a grant proposal in Quarto, you’ve probably wanted one simple thing: make your own name stand out in the bibliography.

CSL (Citation Style Language) doesn’t support this. Pandoc’s citeproc doesn’t support it. There’s no built-in Quarto option for it. So I built highlight-author, a small Quarto extension that does exactly this.

Installation

quarto add michaelaye/highlight-author

Usage

Add three lines to your YAML front matter:

citeproc: false
filters:
  - michaelaye/highlight-author
highlight-author: "Aye"

That’s it. Every occurrence of “Aye” and its surrounding name parts gets wrapped in <strong> tags. Here’s what it looks like on my bibliography page:

Walter, S. H. G., K.-M. Aye, R. Jaumann, and F. Postberg. 2024. “Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Context Camera Updated In-Flight Calibration.” Earth and Space Science 11 (2).

Brown, Sierra, Michael St. Clair, Chase Million, Sabrina Curtis, K. -Michael Aye, and Zack Weinberg. 2024. “PDR: The Planetary Data Reader.” The Journal of Open Source Software 9 (102).

Aye, K.-M., B. T. Greenhagen, and J. P. Williams. 2020. “Investigating the Possibility of Super-Resolution Reconstruction of LRO Diviner Data.” In 51st Annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Notice it handles all the ways a name appears in citations:

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

The entire name span (surname + given names) gets highlighted together, not just the surname in isolation.

Choosing a style

Bold is the default, but you can pick other styles:

# Italic
highlight-author:
  name: "Aye"
  style: italic

# Underline
highlight-author:
  name: "Aye"
  style: underline

# Custom CSS class
highlight-author:
  name: "Aye"
  style: "my-highlight"

The CSS class option is the most flexible. For example, bold + blue:

.my-highlight {
  font-weight: bold;
  color: #2563eb;
}

Why citeproc: false?

Pandoc runs citeproc after all Lua filters, which means a normal filter never sees the rendered bibliography. The workaround is to set citeproc: false in YAML and have the filter call pandoc.utils.citeproc() internally. This is the same approach used by other bibliography-processing extensions like citetools.

If you use other bibliography filters alongside this one (e.g., for year grouping), put highlight-author first in the filter list.

Who is this for?

Anyone with a Quarto document and a bibliography where one name should stand out:

  • Academic homepages and publication lists
  • CVs and resumes
  • Grant proposals (NSF, NASA, and others expect the PI’s name highlighted)
  • Tenure and promotion packets
  • Lab group pages
  • Theses and dissertations

The extension works with any Quarto output format: HTML, PDF, Word.