Adding a footnote / thanks to Rmarkdown title slide

Question

I have to include a note in my title slide declaring the source of my funding. I was able to do this in LyX / LaTeX through:

\author{Michael Chirico\thanks{These people gave me money}, Other Authors}

I have not been able to reproduce this in Rmarkdown. The site mentions using [^] anchoring to mark footnotes, and this works fine in other slides, but I couldn't get it to work in the title:

---
title: "Title"
author: "Michael Chirico[^thanks], Other Authors"
date: "February 10, 2016"
output: beamer_presentation

[^thanks]: These people gave me money
---

The .pdf compiles but there is no title slide. I think this is the relevant part of the compilation log:

pandoc: Could not parse YAML header: UnexpectedEvent {_received = Just (EventSequenceStart Nothing), _expected = Nothing} "source" (line 1, column 1)

If I move [^thanks] outside the header, the .pdf compiles but there is no footer on the title page (nor anywhere else), and [^thanks] appears as-is on the title slide.

How can I add a footnote/thanks section to the title slide?

Surfbird

Answer 1

You could use an inline note. The regular footnote syntax is [^note_call] and then [^note_call]: note_content on a new line. Inline notes' syntax is just ^[note_content]

---
title: "Title"
author: "Michael Chirico^[These people gave me money], Other Authors"
date: "February 10, 2016"
output: beamer_presentation
---

Another solution that allows more flexibility, but is restricted to the beamer output, would be to change the template.

Lackey

this seems perfect. is there any real difference? (besides that mentioned in the link: "unlike regular notes, [inline notes] cannot contain multiple paragraphs") – Surfbird

I don't think so, pandoc parses both syntax as Note elements. You can check by compiling your document with pandoc -t native – Lackey

For the record this sadly doesn't work on the .Rpres format (not that this was asked in the Q, but I would think the solution would apply to both) – Surfbird

Does not work in general Rmarkdown documents either, as of November 2017. – Hindustan