Making a specific name bold in a Quarto document bibliography

1 Problem

I had a Quarto document which included a bibliography (created with the default Pandoc citation handling based on citeproc) and I wanted to highlight a particular author name by making it bold.

2 Solution

First, I made a Quarto filter extension following the steps here: https://quarto.org/docs/extensions/filters.html#quick-start.

I called the filter boldname, and for the Lua filter I adapted the code found here. I put the following code in the boldname.lua file:

local highlight_author_filter = {
  Para = function(el)
    for k,_ in ipairs(el.content) do
          if el.content[k].t == "Str" and el.content[k].text == "Wright"
          and el.content[k+1].t == "Space"
          and el.content[k+2].t == "Str" and el.content[k+2].text:find("^N") then
              local _,e = el.content[k+2].text:find("^N")
              local rest = el.content[k+2].text:sub(e+1) 
              el.content[k] = pandoc.Strong { pandoc.Str("Wright N") }
              el.content[k+1] = pandoc.Str(rest)
              table.remove(el.content, k+2) 
          end
    end
    return el
  end
}

function Div (div)
  if div.identifier:find("^ref-") then
    return pandoc.walk_block(div, highlight_author_filter) 
  end
  return nil
end

This should highlight the text “Wright N” wherever it appears in any div that starts with “ref-”, which is all the divs that contain bibliography entries.

However, this alone did not work because (I think) the citeproc step that creates the bibliography happens after the Lua filter is applied. This is mentioned here. So I used the method described here, creating another filter (called dociteproc) to run citeproc first. In the dociteproc.lua file I put the following code:

-- Lua filter that behaves like `--citeproc`
function Pandoc (doc)
  return pandoc.utils.citeproc(doc)
end

Finally, in the YAML metadata of the Quarto document I included

filters:
  - dociteproc
  - boldname
citeproc: false

to run the dociteproc filter followed by the boldname filter.

The result was that in the bibliography, all appearances of “Wright N” appeared as “Wright N”.