I was typesetting bibliography references with the command \cite[data][ref] and then found that a spce preceded the author name; surrounding the space with X and Y, it gives "X Yauthor" instead of "XYauthor I was able to trace it down to the macro invertedshortauthor in thise case, but I suspect the others (invertedauthor, normalauthor, normalshortauthor) will exhibit the same phenomenon. The macro is: \def\invertedshortauthor#1#2#3#4#5% {\bibdoif{#2}{#2\bibalternative\c!vonsep}% #3\bibalternative\c!surnamesep \bibdoif{#5}{#5\bibalternative\c!juniorsep}% \bibdoif{#4}{#4\unskip}} tracingmacros shows an empty #2-argument takes the \c!vonsep, in bibl- apa.tex defined as a space. I first wondered if the \bibdoif's shouldn't be replaced by a \bibdoifnot. Anyway, that makes the spurious spaces go away. But it seems not right, so I investigated the bibdoif's and found the following behaviour when calling with empty and nonempty arguments. bibdoif:\crlf empty = \bibdoif{}{empty}\crlf notempty = \bibdoif{x}{notempty}\par bibdoifnot:\crlf empty = \bibdoifnot{}{empty}\crlf notempty = \bibdoifnot{x}{notempty}\par bibdoifelse:\crlf empty = \bibdoifelse{}{first}{second}\crlf notempty = \bibdoifelse{x}{first}{second}\par Typesetting gives as a result: bibdoif: empty = empty notempty = notempty bibdoifnot: empty = notempty = bibdoifelse: empty = first notempty = first So I have my doubts about the doif's. Finally another observation on the typesetting by \cite[data][ref]. When typesetting a reference ending on a period, for example "Publ. Co. Inc.", the result has a double period "Publ. Co. Inc.." That looks somewhat silly. yours sincerely, dr. H. van der Meer