Thinspace before delimiter in citation

Question

I want to edit the delimiter in the citation of my document. The MWE

% This is {MWE.tex} Created on 2017-06-12 by thymaro %

\documentclass[11pt,a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{caption}

\usepackage[style=authoryear-ibid]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{mwe.bib}
\renewcommand*{\mkbibnamefamily}[1]{\textsc{#1}}
\renewcommand*{\postnotedelim}{\addspace\addcolon\space}

\usepackage{url}

\begin{document}

\begin{table}
    \centering
    \caption[Agricultural land use]{Agricultural land use \parencite[A34]{br11}}
    \label{tab:lu}
    \begin{tabular}{lr}
        \toprule
        Land use & [ha] \\ \midrule
        arable land (total) &  951 654 \\
        of which soft wheat &  51 842 \\ \bottomrule
    \end{tabular}
\end{table}

\printbibliography

\end{document}

with mwe.bib as follows

@techreport{br11,
address = {New Amsterdam},
author = {{blw -- Baldwin Locomotive Works}},
shortauthor = {blw},
institution = {{Institute for Bio Reports}},
pages = {460},
title = {{Bio Report 2011}},
url = {https://www.bioreport.com},
year = {2011}
}

produces

and I would like the citation to more resemble

with thinspaces (or similar) before and after the colon delimiter, as in

[author] [year] thinspace colon thinspace [pages]

How would I achieve such a result?

A different issue: Are you sure that the entry type @techreport is appropriate for the br11 entry? — Mico, Jun 12 '17 at 05:04
\add... is designed to delete the previous space/punctuation and replace it. So perhaps you want \addthinspace:\addthinspace, but one would need to see more use cases to be sure. — Andrew Swann, Jun 12 '17 at 06:08
biblatex does not like spaces before punctuation and tries hard to suppress them. See also Suppress \unspace command to force biblatex to add spaces (DIN 1505). David's solution here works brilliantly as well. — moewe, Jun 12 '17 at 06:42

David Purton · Accepted Answer · 2017-06-12T11:30:29.857

6

As noted by @moewe in the comments below \addthinspace, \addnbthinspace, and \addspace are removed by biblatex at the start of the postnote. Instead use \thinspace, which uses a \kern and is not removed.

So \renewcommand*{\postnotedelim}{\thinspace\addcolon\thinspace} will do what you want.

edited Jun 12 '17 at 11:30

answered Jun 12 '17 at 05:09

David Purton

25,884

1

Interestingly this does not work for \addthinspace before \addcolon, because \addthinspace is a \hskip which is removed by \unspace while standard \thinspace uses a \kern that is not removed. – moewe Jun 12 '17 at 06:43
@DavidPurton: Can you rewrite your "answer" with some authority rather than stating it as a question? Despite the up-votes, it seems like you're guessing here... – Werner Jun 12 '17 at 11:16
First thing I did, when I read this answer, was try it, expecting to post the erroneous result here. As it turns out, it works (of course, it does). I had thought I had tried something with \thinspace, but it seems I hadn't or made some mistake when trying it. Anyways, many thanks. – thymaro Jun 12 '17 at 15:40

Thinspace before delimiter in citation

1 Answers1