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My ›house‹ citation style is an author-year system with the citations placed in foot- or endnotes rather than in the text. I'm using biblatex's \autocite exclusively, with autocite=footnote so I don't have to care about placing my citation commands in the right place, and to facilitate switching from my style to an inline citation style when I have to submit a text of mine to someone who demands inline citations. (That's because \autocite can be placed before or after terminal punctuation, and will move the footnote mark or brackets to the correct position later.)

Once in a while, though, I have to add a longer comment of mine to a citation. The postnote IMHO isn't a proper place for that, especially when further citations are needed within that comment. So I'm going for a \footnote{\cite{...}...} construction. This works fine most of the time, the only minor annoyance being I now have two different citation commands (but that's for another thread).

But when the citation starting that footnote is a duplicate of the previous one, the resulting ibid will be printed in lowercase, in contrast to the ones that result from the \autocites. It's as if biblatex isn't aware of the position of that citation, thinking it's somewhere in the middle rather than at the beginning of that footnote. Any ideas on how to fix this? 

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\footnote{\cite{malinowski}. I'd like to add: \lipsum[1]} 
\end{document}

enter image description here

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    Use \Cite{malinowski} with a capital "C" at the start of sentences. Or \bibsentence\cite{malinowski}, but why would you do that?
    – moewe
    Apr 15, 2014 at 6:51
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    well, I do know that one :) My impression is that biblatex, usually, is smart enough to take care of things like that on its own, so I what I'm trying to arrive at is a solution that makes use of biblatex's usual smartness ...which of course doesn't exclude fundamental changes to what I'm doing here. My whole \footnote{\cite{}} construction might be a bad idea altogether -- if that's the case, please let me know.
    – Nils L
    Apr 15, 2014 at 6:57
  • Ahhh, no I do not think biblatex is smart enough to track these things. It cannot tell the start of sentences without \bibsentence or similar commands (the fact that it is able to track punctuation and capitalisation within the bibliography is because it inserts these commands itself), it would also not be able to properly capitalise "ibid" in \cite{foo}. \cite{foo}.
    – moewe
    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:01
  • You could probably define a new command for those long postnotes that implicitly calls \bibsentence and be done with the thing.
    – moewe
    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:03
  • yup, I was thinking in that direction too, based on your previous comments. [My original hope was that if biblatex is able to automatically use Ibid vs. ibid (which it is!), it'll be able to do that in this special case as well, if provided with some help.] So, unless someone comes up with something entirely different, that's a decent workaround I guess.
    – Nils L
    Apr 15, 2014 at 7:10

2 Answers 2

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At the start of sentences you should probably use \Cite, which is defined (in biblatex.def) as

\newrobustcmd*{\Cite}{\bibsentence\cite}

It therefore capitalises the first word it prints (as long as biblatex is able to capitalise that word).

MWE

\documentclass[paper=a5,DIV=7,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\footnote{\Cite{malinowski}. I'd like to add: \lipsum[1]} % Prob 2
\end{document}

enter image description here

For your purpose you might want to define a new command (we use LaTeX3's xparse here, so load \usepackage{xparse})

\DeclareDocumentCommand{\longnoteffotcite}{o o m +m}
  {\IfNoValueTF{#2}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1]{#3}. {#4}}}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1][#2]{#3}. {#4}}}}

That behaves like \footcite but takes a mandatory long (i.e. allows for \pars and stuff) additional postnote.

The standard postnotes in biblatex do not seem to allow for \pars.

MWE

\documentclass[paper=a5,DIV=7,12pt]{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\usepackage{xparse}
\usepackage[style=authoryear-icomp,autocite=footnote]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}

\DeclareDocumentCommand{\longnoteffotcite}{o o m +m}
  {\IfNoValueTF{#2}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1]{#3}. {#4}}}
     {\footnote{\Cite[#1][#2]{#3}. {#4}}}}

\begin{document}    
testing.\autocite{malinowski}
testing\autocite{malinowski}.
testing.\longnoteffotcite[9]{malinowski}{I'd like to add: \lipsum[1-2]\par Hi}
\end{document}

enter image description here

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Very late response, but most academic style guides require "ibid." to always be lower case even if at the start of a sentence. So biblatex is doing the right thing by default.

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    Mhhh, normally biblatex would capitalise "ibid" at the beginning of a sentence, it is just that in this particular instance, biblatex can't tell that we are at the beginning of a sentence.
    – moewe
    Aug 19, 2016 at 12:17

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