Question

I’m using MultiMarkdown to generate a LaTeX file of an academic paper I’m working on. I’m using biblatex for the bibliography, which allows for commands like autocite and autocites:

This is a true statement.\autocite{source:2007}

When autocites is used, each braced entry is considered a citation source, which works great when there are multiple sources for the citation:

This is another statement.\autocites{othersource}{yetanothersource}

However, when the text following the autocites command is another bracketed LaTeX command, biblatex treats it as another source, spacing:

This is another statement.\autocites{othersource}{yetanothersource} {\itshape The New York Times}…

results in a footnote that looks like this:

Bib data for othersource; bib data for yetanothersource; \itshape The New York Times

That’s a problem. One obvious way around it is to use a different command for italics, like \emph{The New York Times}, but unfortunately MultiMarkdown uses itshape instead of \emph, and I’d rather not muck around in MMD’s source code.

Is there a LaTeX sequence or code that will force a break between the two sequences of braced commands? Forcing a line break with \\ kind of works ({yetanothersource}\\{\itshape), but it creates a new paragraph after the first command. Is there something similar to \\ that will tell the LaTex engine to begin parsing the {itshape} as a new command rather than as part of autocite{}?

Answer 1

This is a hopeless guess, but have you tried \relax?

Something like:

This is another statement.\autocites{othersource}{yetanothersource}\relax {\itshape The New York Times}…