[Tex/LaTex] Remove spaces after a custom definition

macrosspacing

As scientific species names should be written in italic, I have adopted a shortcut to do this in LaTex by creating a definition in the preamble:

\def\GM{{\it Gadus morhua~}}

Then it's easy to call for \GM is a fish, which returns "Gadus morhua is a fish". Note that I have added ~ to the definition, so that I won't need to write \GM~. This works except, if I want to write The fish is called \GM., which would return "The fish is called Gadus morhua ." (with a space between morhua and period). In order to maximize my lazy writing style I would like to find a way to "eat away" that space I defined earlier. I know that a negative space exists in math mode, but writing $\GM\!$ does not lead to a right result. Is there a way adding a negative space to text mode?

Best Answer

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.«

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[Tex/LaTex] Remove space after command

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}sometext does not do what you think, if part of the action of \cmd is 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, \cmd itself will eat spaces no matter how you define it.

[Tex/LaTex] Remove spaces between words

You must have something equivalent to

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

\setlength\parfillskip{0pt}

\hspace{15pt}Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; 
and I'm not sure about the universe.
\end{document}

which makes

If you remove the \hspace and remove the setting of \parfillskip which is specifying that the last line of the pargarph must reach the right margin, then you get

\documentclass{article}

\begin{document}

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity;
and I'm not sure about the universe.
\end{document}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] Remove space after command

[Tex/LaTex] Remove spaces between words

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