BibLaTeX – Printing ‘Ibid’ in Lowercase at the Beginning of a Footnote

Question

My ›house‹ citation style is an author-year system with the citations placed in foot- or endnotes rather than in the text. I'm using biblatex's \autocite exclusively, with autocite=footnote so I don't have to care about placing my citation commands in the right place, and to facilitate switching from my style to an inline citation style when I have to submit a text of mine to someone who demands inline citations. (That's because \autocite can be placed before or after terminal punctuation, and will move the footnote mark or brackets to the correct position later.)

Once in a while, though, I have to add a longer comment of mine to a citation. The postnote IMHO isn't a proper place for that, especially when further citations are needed within that comment. So I'm going for a \footnote{\cite{...}...} construction. This works fine most of the time, the only minor annoyance being I now have two different citation commands (but that's for another thread).

But when the citation starting that footnote is a duplicate of the previous one, the resulting ibid will be printed in lowercase, in contrast to the ones that result from the \autocites. It's as if biblatex isn't aware of the position of that citation, thinking it's somewhere in the middle rather than at the beginning of that footnote. Any ideas on how to fix this?

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\footnote{\cite{malinowski}. I'd like to add: \lipsum[1]} 
\end{document} 

Answer 1

At the start of sentences you should probably use \Cite, which is defined (in biblatex.def) as

\newrobustcmd*{\Cite}{\bibsentence\cite}

It therefore capitalises the first word it prints (as long as biblatex is able to capitalise that word).

MWE

\documentclass[paper=a5,DIV=7,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\footnote{\Cite{malinowski}. I'd like to add: \lipsum[1]} % Prob 2
\end{document} 

---

For your purpose you might want to define a new command (we use LaTeX3's xparse here, so load \usepackage{xparse})

\DeclareDocumentCommand{\longnoteffotcite}{o o m +m}
  {\IfNoValueTF{#2}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1]{#3}. {#4}}}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1][#2]{#3}. {#4}}}}

That behaves like \footcite but takes a mandatory long (i.e. allows for \pars and stuff) additional postnote.

The standard postnotes in biblatex do not seem to allow for \pars.

MWE

\documentclass[paper=a5,DIV=7,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{xparse}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareDocumentCommand{\longnoteffotcite}{o o m +m}
  {\IfNoValueTF{#2}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1]{#3}. {#4}}}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1][#2]{#3}. {#4}}}}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\longnoteffotcite[9]{malinowski}{I'd like to add: \lipsum[1-2]\par Hi}
\end{document}