1.19 update and fix #1716 breaks the compact title when only title and date fields are present

[chrisothal]

It seems the most recent update to 1.19 removed the custom latex template and uses pandoc's default template. Fix #1716 was proposed to keep a compact title by including compact-title.tex in the includes argument of pdf_document() (essentially render("test.Rmd", output_format = pdf_document(includes = includes(in_header = "compact-title.tex")))). However, if I have title and date fields but no author field, the rendered PDF document contains a blank line between the title and date. I'm not sure if this is a pandoc, latex, or rmarkdown change, as I receive a "no \author given" warning. Rmarkdown before used to render simply the title and date with no whitespace in between and wouldn't throw any issue with a missing \author.

test.Rmd

---
title: "test"
output: pdf_document
date: "12/3/2019"
---
This is a test document

[chrisothal]

After comparing template default-1.17.0.2.tex, it seems the compact-title:yes variable was used within the template to remove the line where the author field would be and assign a blank author. This also gives the versatility in either assigning an author(s) or no authors.

default-1.17.0.2.tex:

$if(author)$
  \author{$for(author)$$author$$sep$ \\ $endfor$}
  $if(compact-title)$
  \preauthor{\centering\large\emph}
  \postauthor{\par}
  $endif$
$else$
  \author{}
  $if(compact-title)$
  \preauthor{}\postauthor{}
  $endif$
$endif$

[yihui]

For the warning "no \author given", I just submitted a PR to Pandoc to fix it: jgm/pandoc#5961

For the blank space when no author is given, I'll see how to remove it. Thanks for the report!

[yihui]

Could you install the development version and see if you are happy with the spacing now? Thank you!

remotes::install_github('rstudio/rmarkdown')

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