To simplify some text I created some commands. One command has no arguments. It uses math mode but is used inside normal text. I would like to remove any trailing space between the command and following text. This will allow me to simply the call such as \cmd sometext instead of {\cmd}sometext. Is there any way to create a negative space?
[Tex/LaTex] Remove space after command
macrosprogrammingspacing
Related Solutions
This is exactly what the xspace package is for. The manual says:
»After defining \newcommand{\gb}{Great Britain\xspace}, the command \gb will determine when to insert a space after itself and when not.«
I am not sure if this is what you want (or why do you want it), but you can use \nointerlineskip and then annihilate the effect of \lineskip:
\documentclass[10pt,letterpaper]{article}
\usepackage[letterpaper,margin=0.75in]{geometry}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{mdwlist}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage{tgpagella}
\pagestyle{empty}
\begin{document}
\setlength{\parskip}{0em}
\setlength{\parindent}{0em}
\makeatletter
\renewcommand\paragraph{\@startsection{paragraph}{4}{\z@}%
{1.25ex \@plus1ex \@minus.2ex}%
{-0em}%
{\normalfont\normalsize\bfseries}}
\renewcommand\subsubsection{\@startsection {subsubsection}{3}{\z@ }%
{-1.5ex\@plus -1ex \@minus -.2ex}%
{1sp \@minus 0ex\nointerlineskip\vspace{-\lineskip}}%
{\normalfont \normalsize \bfseries }}
\makeatother
\subsubsection*{Blah}
This text is 1ex from the heading blah, but I would like it to be hard up
against the heading (but not on the same line)
\end{document}
An some text of the resulting document zoomed at 400% to see the resulting heading and following text:
On a side note, setting \parskip and \parindent to 0pt might not be a good idea (the l2tabu document contains some details).
Best Answer
If your command is truly a single macro without arguments, i.e.
\cmd, then it gobbles spaces written after it anyway. To ensure that any command will absorb following spaces, just make the last thing to appear in it\ignorespaces, which causes TeX to consciously discard space characters until the first non-space appears.By the way:
{\cmd}sometextdoes not do what you think, if part of the action of\cmdis to make definitions of some kind. Those definitions will be discarded inside the group created by{...}unless you make them global. The way to have two items bump up against each other but be parsed separately is to write\cmd{}sometext. However, as I said,\cmditself will eat spaces no matter how you define it.