[texhax] combnat package: extra space in author-year textual citation

[Tom Sutch]

On Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:43:30 +0100
Tom Sutch <tom at oketchup.co.uk> wrote:

> I am preparing conference proceedings using the combine package, and
> using the combnat package (which is the combine-compatible version of
> natbib) for the bibliographic referencing. It is working really well
> on the whole, but I have a small issue with an unwanted extra space
> being inserted after the year when I use \citet.
> 
> So while \citep{foo1962} gives "(Foo and Bar, 1962)" as desired,
> \citet gives "Foo and Bar (1962 )".

An update on this.  I have hacked around with combnat.sty in a
brute-force manner and found that if I comment out line 341 it works,
although not for the case where there's more than one citation in the
brackets (fortunately I don't have too many of these so I can
manually rewrite them). It doesn't look like combnat.sty has been
changed for a while, so I would imagine people have the same version,
but just in case the context of 341 is:

339	       \if\relax\NAT at date\relax\def\@citea{\NAT at sep\ }%
340	       \else
341	         \def\@citea{\NAT@@close\NAT at sep\ }
342	       \fi

I doubt the cause of this problem is this line itself - I would
guess it's something to do with the general treatment of multiple
citations, which need separation and a space between years, not being
modified properly for the case of single citations.  I tried comparing
with the equivalent code in natbib.sty but nothing jumped out.

This is only an ugly hack, rather than a solution, of course, but it is
sufficient for my purposes now and I hope that this (a) helps someone
cleverer than me to find where the problem is, or (b) helps someone who
comes across this problem in future to get round it.