biblatex: postnote behavior

Question

With style=authoryear, biblatex has this neat feature of automatically adding "p. " or "pp. " before page numbers. My problem is that if I add a further comment after the page number such as ", emphasis added", I lose this feature (which makes my citations inconsistent to each other). Here is a MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[style=authoryear,natbib=true]{biblatex}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{referencia.bib}
@misc{john-73,
author = {John, S.},
year = {1973},
title = {The best book ever},
}
\end{filecontents}


\addbibresource{referencia.bib}

\begin{document}

``Some quotation'' \citep[43]{john-73}.

``Some quotation'' \citep[see][43]{john-73}.

``Some \emph{quotation}'' \citep[][43, emphasis added]{john-73}.

 \end{document}

And here is my ouput:

“Some quotation” (John, 1973, p. 43).

“Some quotation” (see John, 1973, p. 43)

“Some quotation” (John, 1973, 43, emphasis added).

The symbol "p. " disappears in the third citation. So, my question is this: how can I preserve "p. " while adding postnotes such as "emphasis added"? Is there a standard way of doing that?

Answer 1

biblatex will normally detect if the postnote argument of a citation is a single page or a page range and will add the appropriate prefix. This also works for, e.g., Roman numerals, but not for numbers plus text, as in your third citation. In these cases, you have to manually add \pno (which prints the single page prefix of the current language) or \ppno (which prints the page range prefix). Using a non-breakable space, you should write your third citation as

``Some \emph{quotation}'' \citep[][\pno~43, emphasis added]{john-73}.

See section 3.12.3 of the biblatex manual for details.