Using the Author field of R Markdown in footer.html - html

Question

R Markdown allows to add a footer to your html output. The YAML header allows to give an author name using a specific field.
I would like to use this author name in my footer.html file, but cannot figure out how to achieve that.
Here is a minimal example:
fic.rmd:
---
title: "title"
author: "Mister-A"
output:
html_document:
include:
after_body: footer.html
---
content
And in the same folder the footer.html file:
I am - #author-name-field-that-I-don't-konw-how-to-get -
Any help or advice would me much appreciated. Thank you very much.

Answer 1

If you want to be able to use the YAML parameters within sections of the report, you need to alter the base pandoc template. You can find all of them here
The basic structure of making this work is to put the variable surrounded by dollar signs to use the YAML variable in the output document. So for example $author$ is required in this case.
Solution
We can create a copy of the pandoc template for HTML in our local directory using the following command. This is the same file as here.
# Copies the RMkarkdown template to the local directory so we can edit it
file.copy(rmarkdown:::rmarkdown_system_file("rmd/h/default.html"), to = "template.html")
In the template.html, we need to add the pandoc tags. To add a footer, we want to add code to the buttom of the document. This is line 457 in the current template but this may change in future versions, so we want to put it after the include-after tag:
$for(include-after)$
$include-after$
$endfor$
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;">I am $author$</p>
$if(theme)$
$if(toc_float)$
</div>
</div>
$endif$
Finally, the R Markdown file looks like:
---
title: "title"
author: "Mister-A"
output:
html_document:
template: template5.html
---
This is some text
As a possible extension of this, you may want to check out this post on designing a stylish footer.