How can I avoid extra whitespace after using a macro before punctuation?

Question

I have a document in which certain frequently-occurring entity names are replaced with macros, e.g.:

\newcommand{\entity}{\emph{Name of Entity}}
...
Lorem ipsum dolor sit \entity, consequat consectetur.

If I define the command like this I get correct formatting if \entity is immediately followed by punctuation (as above) but incorrect formatting otherwise (e.g. Lorem \entity ipsum becomes "Lorem Name of Entityipsum"). If I include the space in the definition of \entity (note space between closing brackets):

\newcommand{\entity}{\emph{Name of Entity} }

I get the opposite behaviour, proper spacing only when not followed by punctuation.

I assume there's some magick command I'm not including in the macro to achieve something sensible?

Have a look at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/25820/no-space-following-macro-without-argument — lockstep, Mar 22 '12 at 16:20
lockstep's link is good; you want to look at the answer that suggests \xspace. — barbara beeton, Mar 22 '12 at 16:22
@lockstep -- \xspace is exactly what I'm after, thanks. Would you care to add that as an answer so I can mark it accepted? — Doches, Mar 22 '12 at 16:32
@Doches It seems nobody but me likes the "delimited macro" approach. ;-) — lockstep, Mar 22 '12 at 16:33
@lockstep -- \xspace doesn't work with plain tex. we oldtimers really do prefer a trailing backslash or a grouped {\command}, but we're a dwindling minority. — barbara beeton, Mar 22 '12 at 16:39

score 6 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

6

Although I personally prefer the "delimited macro" approach described here, you will probably want to use the \xspace macro provided by the package of the same name.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:35

Community

1

answered Mar 22 '12 at 16:36

lockstep

250,273

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 22 '12 at 16:18

4

Put a backslash or an empty group after \entity when you want a space.

\newcommand{\entity}{\emph{Name of Entity}}
...
Lorem \entity\ ipsum
Lorem \entity{} ipsum

answered Mar 22 '12 at 16:18

Ian Thompson

43,767

That works, but I'd greatly prefer a way to make the macro behave sensibly that doesn't require me to manually encode spaces. – Doches Mar 22 '12 at 16:20
You could put the "\ " in the command declaration of course if you know that you always want the space there... – jonalv Mar 22 '12 at 16:25
That's the problem I'm trying to solve, @jonalv -- I would like to use the same macro with and without a following space, and would like LaTeX to figure out which is which. If I define \entity as \newcommand{\entity}{\emph{Name of Entity} } I also get this behaviour ("\ " seems equivalent in command definitions to " "). – Doches Mar 22 '12 at 16:28

How can I avoid extra whitespace after using a macro before punctuation?

2 Answers2