Frontmatter

Frontmatter allows you to specify metadata and options about how your project should behave or render. Included in frontmatter are things like the document or project title, what thumbnail to use for site or content previews, authors that contributed to the work, and scientific identifiers like a doi. Adding frontmatter ensures that these properties are available to downstream tools or build processes like building Create a PDF.

Where to set frontmatter¶

Frontmatter can be set in a markdown (md) or notebook (ipynb) file (described as a “page” below) or in the project: section of a myst.yml file. When project frontmatter is set in a myst.yml file, those settings will be applied to all content in that project (apart from “page only” fields).

In a MyST markdown file¶

A frontmatter section can be added at the top of any md file using --- delimiters.

---
title: My First Article
date: 2022-05-11
authors:
  - name: Mason Moniker
    affiliations:
      - University of Europe
---

In a Jupyter Notebook¶

Frontmatter can be added to the first cell of a Jupyter Notebook, that cell should be a Markdown cell and use --- delimiters as above.

In a `myst.yml` file¶

Frontmatter fields can be added directly to any project: section within a myst.yml file. If your root myst.yml file only contains a site: section, and you want to add frontmatter, add a project: section at the top level and add the fields there. e.g.

version: 1
site: ...
project:
  license: CC-BY-4.0
  open_access: true

Composing multiple `.yml` files¶

You may separate your frontmatter into multiple, composable files. To reference other files from your main myst.yml file, use the extends key with relative path(s) to the other configuration files:

version: 1
site: ...
project: ...
extends:
  - ../macros.yml
  - ../funding.yml

Each entry listed under extends may be a relative path to a file or a URL. URLs must be direct links to files which are downloaded and cached locally. The files must contain valid myst.yml structure with version: 1 and site or project keys. They may also have additional entries listed under extends.

Composing files together this way allows you to have a single source of truth for project frontmatter that may be reused across multiple projects, for example math macros or funding information.

When using extends to compose configuration files, list-type fields are combined, rather than replaced. This means, for example, you may define a single export in one file:

version: 1
project:
  export:
    format: meca

Then, any myst.yml file that extends this file will have a meca export in addition to any other exports it defines. This behavior applies to the list fields: tags, keywords, exports, downloads, funding, resources, requirements, bibliography, editors, and reviewers. The fields exports and downloads are deduplicated by id, so if you wish to override a value from an inherited configuration you may assign it the same id. Other fields cannot be overridden; instead, shared configurations should be as granular and shareable as possible.

Available frontmatter fields¶

The following table lists the available frontmatter fields, a brief description and a note on how the field behaves depending on whether it is set on a page or at the project level. Where a field itself is an object with sub-fields, see the relevant description on the page below.

Table 1:A list of available frontmatter fields and their behavior across projects and pages

field	description	field behavior
`title`	a string (max 500 chars, see Titles)	page & project
`subtitle`	a string (max 500 chars, see Titles)	page & project
`short_title`	a string (max 40 chars, see Titles)	page & project
`description`	a string (max 500 chars)	page & project
`exports`	an export object, see Exporting documents	page & project
`downloads`	a download object, see Downloads, Links and Static Files	page & project
`label`	a string (max 500 chars) to identify the page in cross-references	page only
`tags`	a list of strings. Use to categorize posts/articles or the project to make it easier for readers to find related content within your site.	page & project
`thumbnail`	a link to a local or remote image	page & project
`banner`	a link to a local or remote image	page & project
`parts`	a dictionary of arbitrary content parts, not part of the main article, for example `abstract`, `data_availability` see Document Parts.	page & project
`date`	a valid date formatted string	page can override project
`keywords`	a list of strings. Use in articles to highlight key concepts and facilitate indexing in scientific databases.	page can override project
`authors`	a list of author objects, see Authors	page can override project
`reviewers`	a list of author objects or string ids, see Reviewers, Editors, Funding Recipients	page can override project
`editors`	a list of author objects or string ids, see Reviewers, Editors, Funding Recipients	page can override project
`affiliations`	a list of affiliation objects, see Affiliations	page can override project
`doi`	a valid DOI, either URL or id	page can override project
`arxiv`	a valid arXiv reference, either URL or id	page can override project
`pmid`	a valid PubMed ID, an integer	page can override project
`pmcid`	a valid PubMed Central ID, a string ‘PMC’ followed by numeric digits	page can override project
`open_access`	boolean (true/false)	page can override project
`license`	a license object or a string, see Licenses	page can override project
`copyright`	a string	page can override project
`funding`	a funding object, see Funding	page can override project
`github`	a valid GitHub URL or `owner/reponame`	page can override project
`edit_url`	URL to edit the page source. If this value is unset but `github` is specified, MyST will attempt to compute the specific github URL for the page. You may disable this behavior by explicitly setting `edit_url` to `null`.	page can override project
`binder`	any valid URL	page can override project
`subject`	a string (max 40 chars)	page can override project
`venue`	a venue object with journal and conference metadata fields	page can override project
`volume`	information about the journal volume, see Publication Metadata	page can override project
`issue`	information about the journal issue, see Publication Metadata	page can override project
`first_page`	first page of the project or article, for published works	page can override project
`last_page`	last page of the project or article, for published works	page can override project
`math`	a dictionary of math macros (see Math Macros)	page can override project
`abbreviations`	a dictionary of abbreviations in the project (see Abbreviations)	page can override project
`numbering`	object for customizing content numbering (see Section 3)	page can override project
`options`	a dictionary of arbitrary options validated and consumed by templates, for example, during site or PDF build	page can override project
`id`	id for the project, intended as a unique identifier as the project is used across different contexts	project only
`references`	configuration for intersphinx references (see Sphinx documentation)	project only
`requirements`	files required for reproducing the executional environment, included in the MECA bundle to enable portable execution	project only
`resources`	other resources associated with your project, distributed in the MECA bundle	project only
`jupyter` or `thebe`	configuration for Jupyter execution (see In-Browser Execution)	project only
`kernelspec`	configuration for the kernel (see Kernel specification)	page only
`skip_execution`	opt-out of execution for a particular document (see Execute Notebooks at Build Time)	page only

Field Behavior¶

Frontmatter can be attached to a “page”, meaning a local .md or .ipynb or a “project”. However, individual frontmatter fields are not uniformly available at both levels, and behavior of certain fields are different between project and page levels. There are three field behaviors to be aware of:

page & project: the field is available on both the page & project but they are independent
page only: the field is only available on pages, and not present on projects and it will be ignored if set there.
page can override project: the field is available on both page & project but the value of the field on the page will override any set of the project. Note that the page field must be omitted or undefined, for the project value to be used, value of null (or [] in the case of authors) will still override the project value but clear the field for that page.
project only: the field is only available on projects, and not present on pages and it will be ignored if set there.

Titles¶

There are several fields to title MyST projects and pages. Primary page and project titles can be specified simply as title. Pages and projects also both have short_title; this should provide a summarized title in less than 40 characters. It is used where space is limited, for example a site navigation panel, running-head titles in an static export, etc. On pages (not projects) you may specify subtitle; this conveys complimentary information to the title and may be displayed below the title.

Defining Page Title in Markdown

If title is not defined in the frontmatter, it will be pulled from the a heading at the top of the markdown instead. In this case, the heading will be removed from the content to the frontmatter for usage in a MyST site header or exported document title page.

---
author: Marissa Myst
---

# My MyST Title

## Introduction

For this page, "My MyST Title" is the title!
...

If removing the title causes unexpected problems with the page formatting, you may set title: null in the frontmatter to prevent heading removal. The first heading will still be copied as a placeholder title, but it will not be removed from the markdown. However, in these cases, it is probably easiest to simply define a title in frontmatter!

The thumbnail is used in previews for your site in applications like Twitter, Slack, or any other link preview service. This should, by convention, be included in a thumbnails folder next to your content. You can also explicitly set this field to any other image on your local file system or a remote URL to an image. This image will get copied over to your public folder and optimized when you build your project.

thumbnail: thumbnails/myThumbnail.png

If you do not specify an image the first image in the content of a page will be selected. If you explicitly do not want an image, set thumbnail to null.

You can also set a banner image which will show up in certain themes, for example, the article-theme:

banner: banner.png

Authors¶

The authors field is a list of author objects. Available fields in the author object are:

Table 2:Frontmatter information for authors

field description

name a string OR CSL-JSON author object - the author’s full name; if a string, this will be parsed automatically. Otherwise, the object may contain given, surname, non_dropping_particle, dropping_particle, suffix, and full name literal

id a string - a local identifier that can be used to reference a repeated author

orcid a string - a valid ORCID identifier with or without the URL

corresponding boolean (true/false) - flags any corresponding authors, you must include an email if true.

email a string - email of the author, required if corresponding is true

roles

a list of strings - must be valid CRediT Contributor Roles

authors:
  - name: Penny Crediton
    roles:
      - Conceptualization
      - Data curation
      - Validation

CRediT Roles

There are 14 official contributor roles that are in the NISO CRediT Role standard. In addition to British english, incorrect case or punctuation, there are also a number of aliases that can be used for various roles.

Official CRediT Role	Alias
Conceptualization	`conceptualisation`
Data curation
Formal analysis	`analysis`
Funding acquisition
Investigation
Methodology
Project administration	`administration`
Resources
Software
Supervision
Validation
Visualization	`visualisation`
Writing – original draft	`writing`
Writing – review & editing	`editing`, `review`

affiliations

a list of strings that identify or create an affiliation or a full Affiliation object, for example:

authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliations:
      - id: ubc
        institution: University of British Columbia
        ror: 03rmrcq20
        department: Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
  	  - ACME Inc
  - name: Miles Mysterson
    affiliation: ubc

See Affiliations for more information on how to concisely write affiliations.

equal_contributor a boolean (true/false), indicates that the author is an equal contributor

deceased a boolean (true/false), indicates that the author is deceased

url a string - website or homepage of the author

bluesky a bluesky username

mastodon a mastodon username (@user@example.com) or URL

threads a threads/instagram username

linkedin a linkedin URL

twitter (or x) a x/twitter username

github a GitHub username

note a string, a freeform field to indicate additional information about the author, for example, acknowledgments or specific correspondence information.

phone a phone number, e.g. (301) 754-5766

fax for people who still use these machines, beep, boop, beeeep! 📠🎶

url, github, and other social links See Table 3 for all social profile links for the author

Contributors and affiliations can also have social links and URLs.

Table 3:Social Links for contributors and affiliations.

`url`	a string - website or homepage of the author
`bluesky`	a bluesky username
`mastodon`	a mastodon username (`@user@example.com`) or URL
`threads`	a threads/instagram username
`linkedin`	a linkedin URL
`twitter` (or `x`)	a x/twitter username
`github`	a GitHub username

Reviewers, Editors, Funding Recipients¶

Other contributors besides authors may be listed elsewhere in the frontmatter. These include reviewers, editors, and funding award investigators and recipients. For all of these fields, you may use a full author object, or you may use the string id from an existing author object defined elsewhere in your frontmatter.

Affiliations¶

You can create an affiliation directly by adding it to an author, and it can be as simple as a single string.

authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliation: University of British Columbia

You can also add much more information to any affiliation, such as a ROR, ISNI, or an address. A very complete affiliations list for an author at the University of British Columbia is:

authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliations:
      - id: ubc
        institution: University of British Columbia
        ror: https://ror.org/03rmrcq20
        isni: 0000 0001 2288 9830
        department: Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
        address: 2020 – 2207 Main Mall
        city: Vancouver
        region: British Columbia
        country: Canada
        postal_code: V6T 1Z4
        phone: 604 822 2449
        bluesky: '@eoas.ubc.ca'
  - name: Miles Mysterson
    affiliation: ubc

Notice how you can use an id to avoid writing this out for every coauthor. Additionally, if the affiliation is a single string and contains a semi-colon ; it will be treated as a list. The affiliations can also be added to your project frontmatter in your myst.yml and used across any document in the project.

article.md

myst.yml

---
title: My Article
authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliation: ubc
  - name: Miles Mysterson
    affiliations: ubc; stanford
---

affiliations:
  - id: ubc
    institution: University of British Columbia
    ror: https://ror.org/03rmrcq20
    isni: 0000 0001 2288 9830
    department: Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
    address: 2020 – 2207 Main Mall
    city: Vancouver
    region: British Columbia
    country: Canada
    postal_code: V6T 1Z4
    phone: 604 822 2449
  - id: stanford
    name: ...

If you use a string that is not recognized as an already defined affiliation in the project or article frontmatter, an affiliation will be created automatically and normalized so that it can be referenced:

Written Frontmatter

Normalized

authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliations:
      - id: ubc
        institution: University of British Columbia
        ror: 03rmrcq20
        department: Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
      - ACME Inc
  - name: Miles Mysterson
    affiliation: ubc

authors:
  - name: Marissa Myst
    affiliations: ['ubc', 'ACME Inc']
  - name: Miles Mysterson
    affiliations: ['ubc']
affiliations:
  - id: ubc
    institution: University of British Columbia
    ror: https://ror.org/03rmrcq20
    department: Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences
  - id: ACME Inc
    name: ACME Inc

Table 4:Frontmatter information for affiliations

field	description
`id`	a string - a local identifier that can be used to reference a repeated affiliation
`name`	a string - the affiliation name. Either `name` or `institution` is required
`institution`	a string - Name of an institution or organization (for example, a university or corporation) If your research group has a name, you can use both `name` and `institution`, however, at least one of these is required.
`department`	a string - the affiliation department (e.g. Chemistry 🧪)
`doi`, `ror`, `isni`, `ringgold`	Identifiers for the affiliation (DOI, ROR, ISNI, and Ringgold). We suggest using https://ror.org if possible to search for your institution. `affiliations: - name: Boston University ringgold: 1846 isni: 0000 0004 1936 7558 ror: 05qwgg493 doi: 10.13039/100018578`
`email`	a string - email of the affiliation, required if `corresponding` is `true`
`address`, `city`, `state`, `postal_code`, and `country`	affiliation address information. In place of `state` you can use `province` or `region`.
`url`, `github`, and other social links	See Table 3 for all social profile links for the affiliation
`phone`	a phone number, e.g. `(301) 754-5766`
`fax`	A fax number for the affiliation
`collaboration`	a boolean - Indicate that this affiliation is a collaboration, for example, `"MyST Contributors"` can be both an affiliation and a listed author. This is used in certain templates as well as in JATS.

Date¶

The date field is a string and should conform to a well-defined calendar date. Examples of acceptable date formats are:

2022-12-14 - YYYY-MM-DD
01 Jan 2000 - DD? MON YYYY
Sat, 1 Jan 2000 - DAY, DD? MON YYYY

These dates correspond to two main formats:

A strict (full, extended) calendar date defined by ISO 8601 (see also RFC 3339)
A date-only variant of RFC 2822, built using the RFC gammar rules.

Exports¶

Exports allow you to generate static versions of your MyST documents, often through intermediary build engines like Latex. For usage information, see Exporting documents.

Table 5:Frontmatter export definitions

field	description
`id`	a string - a local identifier that can be used to reference the export
`format`	one of `pdf` (built with $\LaTeX$ or Typst, depending on the template), `tex` (raw $\LaTeX$ files), `pdf+tex` (both PDF and raw $\LaTeX$ files) `typst` (raw Typst files and built PDF file), `docx`, `md`, `jats`, or `meca`
`template`	a string - name of an existing MyST template or a local path to a template folder. Templates are only available for `pdf`, `tex`, `typst`, and `docx` formats.
`output`	a string - export output filename with a valid extension or destination folder
`zip`	a boolean - if `true`, zip the output - only applies for multi-file exports `tex`, `pdf+tex` and `typst`.
`articles`	a list of strings - path(s) to articles to include in your export - this is required for exports defined in project frontmatter; for page frontmatter, the default article will be the page itself. Not all exports currently support multiple articles.
`toc`	a string - path to jupyterbook `_toc.yml` file - may be used as an alternative to listing `articles`
`sub_articles`	a list of strings - path(s) to sub-articles for `jats` export

Downloads¶

Downloads allow you to include downloadable files with a MyST website. They are specified in either:

myst.yml

project:
  downloads:
    - file: ...
    - id: ...

In page frontmatter:

page.md

---
downloads:
  - file: ...
  - id: ...
---

See Downloads, Links and Static Files information about how to use this feature. Below is a list of all possible downloads configuration.

Table 6:Frontmatter download definitions

field	description
`id`	a string - reference to an existing `export` identifier. The referenced export may be defined in a different file. If `id` is defined, `file`/`url` are not allowed.
`file`	a string - a path to a local file. If `file` is defined, `id`/`url` are not allowed.
`url`	a string - either a full URL or a relative URL of a page in your MyST project. If `url` is defined, `id`/`file` are not allowed.
`title`	a string - title of the `downloads` entry. This will show up as text on the link in your MyST site. `title` is recommended for all downloads, but only required for `url` values; files will default to `filename` title
`filename`	a string - name of the file upon download. By default, this will match the original filename. `url` values do no require a `filename`; if provided, the `url` will be treated as a download link rather than page navigation.
`static`	a boolean - this is automatically set to `true` for local files and `false` otherwise. You may also explicitly set this to `false`; this will bypass any attempt to find the file locally and will keep the value for `url` exactly as it is provided.

Licenses¶

This field can be set to a string value directly or to a License object.

Available fields in the License object are content and code allowing licenses to be set separately for these two forms of content, as often different subsets of licenses are applicable to each. If you only wish to apply a single license to your page or project use the string form rather than an object.

If selecting a license from the SPDX License List, you may simply use the “Identifier” string; MyST will expand these identifiers into objects with name, url, and additional metadata related to open access (OSI-approved, FSF free, and CC). Identifiers for well-known licenses are easily recognizable (e.g. MIT or BSD) and MyST will attempt to infer the specific identifier if an ambiguous license is specified (e.g. GPL will be interpreted as GPL-3.0+ and a warning raised letting you know of this interpretation). Some common licenses are:

Common Content Licenses	Common Code Licenses
`CC-BY-4.0` `CC-BY-SA-4.0` `CC-BY-N-SA-4.0` `CC0-1.0`	`MIT` `BSD` `GPL-3.0+` `Apache-2.0` `LGPL-3.0-or-later` `AGPL`

By using the correct SPDX Identifier, your website will automatically use the appropriate icon for the license and link to the license definition. The simplest and most common example is something like:

license: CC-BY-4.0

Nonstandard licenses¶

Although not recommended, you may specify nonstandard licenses not found on the SPDX License List. For these, you may provide an object where available fields are id, name, url, and note. You can also extend the default SPDX Licenses by providing modified values for these fields. Here is a more complex example where content and code have different licenses; content uses an SPDX License with an additional note, and code uses a totally custom license.

license:
  content:
    id: CC-BY-4.0
    note: When attributing this content, please indicate the Source was MyST Documentation.
  code:
    name: I Am Not A Lawyer License
    url: https://example.com/i-am-not-a-lawyer

Funding¶

Funding frontmatter is able to contain multiple funding and open access statements, as well as award info.

It may be as simple as a single funding statement:

funding: This work was supported by University.

Funding may also specify award id, name, sources (affiliation object or reference), investigators (contributor objects or references), and recipients (contributor objects or references).

authors:
  - id: auth0
    name: Jane Doe
funding:
  statement: This work was supported by University.
  id: award-id-000
  name: My Award
  sources:
    - name: University
  investigators:
    - name: John Doe
  recipients:
    - auth0

Multiple funding objects with multiple awards are also possible:

authors:
  - id: auth0
    name: Jane Doe
funding:
  - statement: This work was supported by University.
    awards:
      - id: award-id-000
        name: My First Award
        sources:
          - name: University
        investigators:
          - name: John Doe
        recipients:
          - auth0
      - id: award-id-001
        name: My Second Award
        sources:
          - name: University
        investigators:
          - name: John Doe
        recipients:
          - auth0
  - statement: Open access was supported by Consortium.
    open_access: Users are allowed to reproduce without prior permission
    awards:
      - id: open-award-999
        sources:
          - name: Consortium

Venue¶

The term venue is borrowed from the OpenAlex API definition:

Venues are where works are hosted.

For MyST frontmatter, the venue object holds metadata for journals and conferences where a work may be presented.

Table 8:Available Venue fields

field	description
`title`	full title of the venue
`short_title`	short title of the venue; often journals have a standard abbreviation that should be defined here
`url`	URL of the venue
`doi`	the venue DOI
`number`	number of the venue in a series, for example the “18th Python in Science Conference”
`location`	physical location of a conference
`date`	date associated with the venue, for example the dates of a conference. This field is a string, not a timestamp, so it may be a date range.
`series`	title of a series that this venue or work is part of. Examples include a conference proceedings series, where each year a new conference-specific proceedings journal is created, or a category of articles across multiple issues, such as colloquium papers.
`issn`	ISSN for the publication
`publisher`	publisher of the journal

Some typical venue values may be:

venue:
  title: Journal of Geophysics
  short_title: J. Geophys
  url: https://journal.geophysicsjournal.com

venue:
  title: EuroSciPy 2022
  url: https://www.euroscipy.org/2022

Publication Metadata¶

MyST includes several fields to maintain bibliographic metadata for journal publications. First, it has first_page and last_page - these are page numbers for the article in its printed form. Also, volume and issue are available to describe the journal volume/issue containing the article. Each of these properties has the same fields available, described in Table 9.

Table 9:Available Volume and Issue fields

field	description
`number`	a string or a number to identify journal volume/issue
`title`	title of the volume/issue, if provided separately from number
`subject`	description of the subject of the volume/issue
`doi`	the volume/issue DOI

An example of publication metadata for an article may be:

first_page: 1500
last_page: 1503
volume:
  number: 12
issue:
  name: Winter
  description: Special issue on software documentation
  doi: 10.62329/MYISSUE

These fields provide a more complete superset of publication metadata than the “biblio” object defined by OpenAlex API:

Old-timey bibliographic info for this work. This is mostly useful only in citation/reference contexts. These are all strings because sometimes you’ll get fun values like “Spring” and “Inside cover.”

If MyST frontmatter includes an OpenAlex biblio object, it will be coerced to valid publication metadata.

Reference

Roles