[texhax] Automatically preventing line breaks before citations

[Trevor Harmon]

On Jul 6, 2008, at 11:47 AM, tom sgouros wrote:

> I don't know how to work the TeX engineering side of this, but you  
> could
> try social engineering instead.  Fix your new package so that your
> change is an option to cite.sty and submit it as an improvement to  
> that
> package.  If it's backward-compatible, I don't see why it shouldn't be
> considered.

That's a good idea. It won't be necessary, however, because upon  
further investigation, I discovered that the functionality I require  
already exists!

Apparently I was confused about how the cite.sty package works. I was  
thinking that cite.sty is the actual citation code in TeX, when in  
fact it's just an extension of TeX's built-in citation mechanism. That  
is, I assumed cite.sty was somehow included implicitly in every TeX  
document, but I realize now it's just another add-on package.

To make a long story short, what I said before about highpenalty vs.  
10000 is incorrect. The highpenalty value that cite.sty provides by  
default is enough to prevent line breaks. So all I have to do is this:

\usepackage{cite}

Trevor