Text field as List, and "Individual layout" purpose clarification

Hello, first of all thank you for your great work!

I have the need to represent a "text" field type into a list of the possible values this text field takes: as an example, I have a list of books each one with its author that is inserted in a text field, but I would like the filter to appear as a list of the authors of all the books, instead of an empty text field that the user has to fill.
I think this could be a common request but I understand is not offered yet in the component so I'm ready to do the needed tweakings to the code (get the authors querying the database and fill the list). Any help is anyway appreciated on how to accomplish this task.

For this I am wondering if the "Individual layout" setting on fields can be used; I couldn't find any documentation about it.
At the moment, if I have a text field and I select list as Individual layout, the field just disappears. Maybe with this setting I would be able to program a specific behaviour for that text field, like showing itself as a list like i mentioned before? And if yes, how to use this "Individual layout" setting in order to have a personalized behaviour/appearance for a field?

btw, I am aware of layout overriding possibility but this doesnt work in my case since this "list" field instead of text has to appear just for one specific category and not for all the text fields of the website.

Thank you so much for the help in understanding how to correctly use this component settings.

Nothing? Any hint for using the "Individual layout" setting since is not documented at all?
thank you.