[Tex/LaTex] Why doesn’t \renewcommand{\ref}{\autoref} change \ref into \autoref

cross-referencinghyperref

First off, I'm very grateful of the help this community has provided me so far. Anyway, to my problem:

I feel like I'm missing something obvious here. I want…

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{hyperref} 
\renewcommand{\ref}{\autoref}

\begin{document}
\section{Section Title} \label{anchor}
Blah Blah Blah. \ref{anchor}
\end{document}

to print as…

1 Section Title

Blah Blah Blah. section 1

but instead I get …

1 Section Title

Blah Blah Blah. 1

… so \ref is not being replaced with \autoref. How can I correct this? Do I have no option but to do a find-and-replace to change \ref to \autoref?

Best Answer

Ok, figured out a solution:

enter image description here

Notes:

None of the usual tricks of using:
1. \renewcommand{\ref}[1]{\autoref{#1}}
2. \def\ref#1{\autoref{#1}}
3. \let\ref\autoref
4. \LetLtxMacro\ref\autoref
seem to work in this case.

I suspect it is because hyperref does an \AtBeginDocument, so that some things get defined at the the start of the document. So using \AtBeginDocument puts our redefinition at the end of queue of commands that get executed \AtBeginDocument.

And since placing the \AtBeginDocument to be before \usepackage{hyperref} does not work, this confirms that the suspicion was correct.

Code:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{hyperref} 


\AtBeginDocument{\renewcommand{\ref}[1]{\autoref{#1}}}

\begin{document}
\section{Section Title} \label{anchor}
Blah Blah Blah.  \autoref{anchor}  \ref{anchor}
\end{document}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] What’s the difference between \ref and \autoref

\autoref is a command from the hyperref package which is used to have some automatic prefix added to the reference. For instance if you used \label{sec:intro} just after your command for the introduction section the \autoref{sec:intro} command will output "section X" with X being the good number.

Of course you can imagine that the prefix depends on the type of the object to which the label is linked. If it is a figure, it will output "figure" and so on.

Note that you can redefine the prefix for the autoref command associated to a given type of object. For instance for the sections use:

\def\sectionautorefname{New prefix for the sections}

More generally,

\def\<type>autorefname{<new name>}

[Tex/LaTex] Problem with underscores in \newcommand

Underscores can be part of a label, but printing them is normally disallowed, because the underscore is used in running text for denoting subscripts in math formulas.

Option 2 should give no problem: you're just replacing \ref with \refext. For option 1, when you want to see the keys rather than the reference, you can do

\newcommand{\refext}[1]{Ref.~\texttt{\detokenize{#1}}}

The \detokenize command will, besides other things, make _ printable. I added also \texttt in order to make the key more evident in the text.

Small example (I'll use option 2):

\documentclass{article}

\newcommand{\refext}[1]{Ref.~\texttt{\detokenize{#1}}}

\begin{document}

Here's some text where we cite \refext{some_thing} and go on

\end{document}