[texhax] Automatically preventing line breaks before citations

[Trevor Harmon]

On Jul 6, 2008, at 6:30 PM, Trevor Harmon wrote:

> 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}

Hmm... looks like my statement above is also incorrect, at least  
partially. It turns out that the \@highpenalty value used by cite.sty  
(usually defined as 301) is enough to prevent *most* citation line  
breaks but not *all* of them. For example, I have a document with  
about 150 citations, of which 13 have a line break between the  
citation and the text that precedes it. Using cite.sty prevents the  
line breaks in only 7 of these 13. If, however, I change cite.sty to  
use a penalty of 10000 instead of \@highpenalty, all 13 line breaks  
are fixed.

I think the best solution, then, is to change the cite.sty package to  
use 10000 for the penalty. (It doesn't make sense to prevent line  
breaks only some of the time.) I sent an email to the author of  
cite.sty to discuss this change, but it bounced back to me saying  
"name or service not known". I used the email address listed in  
cite.sty's README:

http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/cite/

What do I do now?

Trevor