Custom acronyms via \def

Question

I'd like to define acronyms via the \def command. I know that the acronym package exists, but that's too much typing (\ac{myacronym} vs. \myacronym).

The problem that I have is that for \def\myacronym{acronym expanded}, it won't have an empty space after it, so I can only use it in front of punctuation. For \def\myacronym{acronym expanded }, I cannot use it before punctuation because it always causes an empty space.

My question is: How can I detect whether punctuation comes after the acronym, so I can dynamically generate a space only if needed. Also, it would be nice to be able to detect whether there is the string ". " before my acronym, so I could make the acronym uppercase dynamically.

I guess this is kind of hard to do since those parameters are not passed to the function, but maybe somebody has an idea. Thanks for your help:)

Answer 1

If I understand it correctly, the \xspace macro from the xspace package does this.

Usage:

\usepackage{xspace}
...
\newcommand\myacronym{whatever\xspace}

similar for plain.tex.

Answer 2

Use the xspace package, and put \xspace at the end of your definitions.

Answer 3

You have gotten the answer to the \def question.

This is just a note.

I used to format acronyms as I go and find that very distracting with long documents. So now while drafting I input acronyms as is (all caps) and at final stage use the text editor to change all of them into the markup I need. It takes about 0.3 second for each chapter and save me from all those extra typings.

BTW, in general I'd recommend the package glossaries for typesetting acronyms.

Answer 4

I don't know of any way to look behind to tell whether or not the acronym should be capitalised, but you could fake it. If you define \Myacronym to be the correctly capitalised version then you can use \myacronym or \Myacronym accordingly. Although this isn't quite what you want, it will actually look better when scanning the source text: compare

And so to bed. \Myacronym got up early in the morning.

with

And so to bed. \myacronym got up early in the morning.

On a quick scan, the eye doesn't recognise the \ and disregards it as noise; thus the small 'm' looks a bit odd on the second one.