where does org-mode get the \author field for latex output

Question

My exported pdf and and .tex file both include a name inherited from the logged-in unix account, I am having trouble over-riding this setting with #+LATEX_HEADER: \author {} in the .org file.

Watch for Tom Smith vs. Joe Brown in this code. The question is, where does org-mode derive the Tom Smith from? my .bib file includes the lines at the top, I don't see any setting to explain this.

% This BibTeX bibliography file was created using BibDesk.
% Created for Tom Smith at YYYY day t
% Saved with string encoding Unicode (UTF-8) 

my .org file says

#+LATEX_HEADER:\author{Joe Brown}

When I look in the exported .tex it has 2 lines

\author{Joe Brown}
\author{Tom Smith}

the compiled pdf features Tom Smith Where does org-mode get the \author field from if it's not declared in

#+LATEX_HEADER:\author{} ?

Is it coming from ~/.emacs.d/.init.d ? Neither Tom Smith nor author are anywhere in my .spacemacs.

Answer 1

Each export back-end has AUTHOR keyword, associated with global variable user-full-name. If it's empty, the \author will not be exported. You could redefine it into the file (buffer) with

#+AUTHOR: Joe Brown

This will set only one \author, which is defined into the buffer even if the user-full-name is not empty.

Org didn't check that you define author with LATEX_HEADER: \author, it just outputs these lines.

Answer 2

Emacs documentation:

M-x describe variable user-full-name

user-full-name is a variable defined in ‘C source code’. Its value is "Tom Smith" :: The full name of the user logged in.

You can customize this variable.
solution: Click on customize and change to Joe Brown inside emacs.

further explanation: the full name of the logged in user is not the same as your short-account-name. It can be obtained from a shell prompt by:

finger `whoami` | awk -F: '{ print $3 }' | head -n1 | sed 's/^ //'

If you desire the pdfs you write in org mode to have a different name than your unix user full name, you can override the value inherited from the os.