Does something like this work for you:

#+options: author:nil
#+author: Test author - not shown in export

@@odt:<text:author-name>First author
line</text:author-name><text:line-break/><text:author-name>Second
line</text:author-name>@@

Testing with content

This exports to ODT like this for me:
[image: image.png]

John

-----------------------------------
Professor John Kitchin (he/him/his)
Doherty Hall A207F
Department of Chemical Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
412-268-7803
@johnkitchin
http://kitchingroup.cheme.cmu.edu



On Thu, Aug 26, 2021 at 10:24 AM Eric S Fraga <e.fraga@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:

> So, as usual, I answer my own question, sort of.
>
> The problem is that org exports the author text enclosed within a
> special directives, specifically:
>
>  (format "<text:initial-creator>%s</text:initial-creator>" author))
>
> New line directives are not allowed within this declaration, it
> seems.  Removing (manually) the initial-creator directive then works.
>
> So, my question would be: is this text:initial-creator tagging
> necessary?  If not, can we remove it?  The OpenDocument schema is vague
> about whether this is necessary.  If we cannot remove it, i.e if
> initial-creator is required in the document, could it be put in
> separately (as a meta:initial-creator tag) so that the author field can
> be more general?
>
> I am *not* an ODT expert of any sort.  But it is my route to Word
> documents when the need arises (which is luckily seldom).
>
> Anyway, no panic: I can simply manually edit the odt file just before
> the final processing...
>
> Thank you,
> eric
>
> --
> : Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50, Org release_9.4.6-628-g366444
> : Latest paper written in org: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05096
>
>