Customising R markdown pdf document

Question

I am trying to accommodate multiple authors and affiliations as follows.

---
title: "Title"
author: | 
  | Author1^1^, Author2^2^, Author3^1^ and Author4^2^
  | 1. Affiliation1
  | 2. Affiliation2
date: "Wednesday, April 10, 2015"
output:
  pdf_document
---

With above I am getting

How to modify the default R markdown Yaml header to get customised output in the author field? I would like to.

1. Avoid italics for affiliation.
2. Have some space between author and affiliation (Empty line with | does not work).
3. Reduced font size for affiliation alone.

Answer 1

I was looking a good way to add different affiliations with an elsevier template within 'rticles' and i could do it like this:

---
title: Title
author:
  - name: Sergio Ibarra Espinosa^a^
    email:  [email protected]
  - name: María de Fátima Andrade^a^
  - name: Seaghán Mhartain^b^
  - name: Rita Yuri Ynoue^a^
address:
  - code: 1
    address: Instituto de Astronomía, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas, Universidade de São Paulo
  - code: 2
    address: Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de São Paulo
abstract: abstract

  It consists of two paragraphs.

bibliography: mybibfile.bib
output: rticles::elsevier_article
---

which produced the following result:

I hope it can help