How to sort a listing in Quarto by author's last name?

[epurdom]

Description

I am using Quarto for a website. I have a page listing people (similar to a department website listing all faculty), which I am doing via a listing. The YAML heading looks like this:

---
title: "People in My Group"
format: html
listing:
  id: organizing
  contents: 
    - people.yaml
  sort: "author"
  type: grid
  grid-columns: 5
---

The people to be listed are in a YAML file that looks something like this:

- author: Bob Jones
  path: "https://jones.com/"
  image: "jones.jpeg"
- author: Jill Barber
  path: "https://jbarber.com/"
  image: "jbarber.jpg"
- author: John Smith
  path: "https://smith.com"
  image: "smith.jpg"

I would like them listed in alphabetical order by author last name, but the above only sorts by the first name if I ask to sort by author. Is there an option for sort that would give sorting by family name? I haven't been able to find documentation on the full set of what is accepted for sorting options.

Of course, I could list them as Jones, Bob in the YAML file but I want when they are rendered in the grid to say Bob Jones, not Jones, Bob (which is what happens if I do Jones, Bob in the YAML file).

Btw, I can't explicitly give family versus given name in the YAML file because I hit this bug. However, my understanding is that when you type Bob Jones for an author entry, it is parsed into given and family name anyway so I assume the problem is not that Quarto doesn't know family from given name, but rather I don't know what is the right phrase to trigger pulling from the family name.

(I submitted this to Stackoverflow before I realized Quarto has its own discussion pages; sorry for the duplicate posting, but there was no response on Stackoverflow after 2 weeks...)

[mcanouil]

The sort is silently ignored (evaluates to undefined) because item[l.field] in website-listing-read.ts performs a plain key lookup. "author.name" is not a valid top-level key on a ListingItem.

Relevant code:

• quarto-cli/src/project/types/website/listing/website-listing-read.ts

  Lines 270 to 283 in c792ec2

  	listing.sort.map((l) => {
  	return (item: ListingItem) => {
  	// handle undefined for 'order' (it's used by our default)
  	const value = item[l.field];
  	if (value === undefined && l.field === kFieldOrder) {
  	if (l.direction === "asc") {
  	return Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER;
  	} else {
  	return 0;
  	}
  	} else {
  	return value;
  	}
  	};

Even if dot-notation was supported so that sort: "author.name asc" traverses nested object fields, e.g. resolving item["author"]["name"], it wouldn't work for author.

Even though author can be defined as a rich object in front matter:

author:
 name: "Jane Doe"
 affiliation: "University of X"

Quarto's listing pipeline normalises it to a flat string[] before it ever reaches the sort mechanism, via this code:

• quarto-cli/src/project/types/website/listing/website-listing-read.ts

  Lines 1153 to 1166 in c792ec2

  	const authors = parseAuthor(documentMeta?.author);
  	let structuredAuthors;
  	if (authors) {
  	structuredAuthors = cslNames(
  	authors?.filter((auth) => auth !== undefined).map((auth) => auth?.name),
  	);
  	}
  	const author = structuredAuthors
  	? uniq(
  	structuredAuthors.map((auth) =>
  	auth.literal || `${auth.given} ${auth.family}`
  	),
  	)
  	: [];

The parseAuthor → cslNames pipeline extracts auth.literal || "${auth.given} ${auth.family}",
producing e.g. ["Jane Doe"]. The object structure is gone by the time sorting runs.

This means:

Sort field	Works?	Reason
author asc	✅	Sorts on the already-flattened string[]
author.name asc	❌	author.name was dissolved — but also, dot-notation is not supported anyway
myobj.sub asc	❌	Dot-notation not supported for any custom object field