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1 Introduction

The glossaries bundle includes the package mfirstuc which provides the command:

This makes the first object of ⟨stuff ⟩ uppercase unless ⟨stuff ⟩ starts with a control sequence followed by a non-empty group, in which case the first object in the group is converted to uppercase. No expansion is performed on the argument.

Examples:

• \makefirstuc{abc} produces Abc.
• \makefirstuc{\emph{abc}} produces Abc (\MakeUppercase has been applied to the letter “a” rather than \emph). Note however that
  \makefirstuc{{\em abc}}

  produces ABC (first object is {\em abc} so equivalent to \MakeUppercase{\em abc}), and

  {\makefirstuc{\em abc}}

  produces abc (\em doesn’t have an argument therefore first object is \em and so is equivalent to {\MakeUppercase{\em}abc}).

• \makefirstuc{{\’a}bc} produces Ábc.
• \makefirstuc{\ae bc} produces Æbc.
• \makefirstuc{{\ae}bc} produces Æbc.
• \makefirstuc{{ä}bc} produces Äbc.

Note that non-Latin or accented characters appearing at the start of the text must be placed in a group (even if you are using the inputenc package). The reason for this restriction is detailed in §3 UTF-8.

Note also that

produces: ABC. This is because the first object in the argument of \makefirstuc is \abc, so it does \MakeUppercase{\abc}. Whereas:

produces: Abc. There is a short cut command which will do this:

This is equivalent to \expandafter\makefirstuc\expandafter{⟨stuff ⟩}. So

produces: Abc.

If you use mfirstuc without the glossaries package, the standard \MakeUppercase command is used. If used with glossaries, \MakeTextUppercase (defined by textcase the package) is used instead. If you are using mfirstuc without the glossaries package and want to use \MakeTextUppercase instead, you can redefine

For example:

Remember to also load textcase (glossaries loads this automatically).

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2 Capitalise Each Word in a Phrase or Sentence (Title Case)

New to mfirstuc v1.06:

This command apply \makefirstuc to each word in ⟨text⟩ where the space character is used as the word separator. Note that it has to be a plain space character, not another form of space, such as ~ or \space. Note that no expansion is performed on ⟨text⟩.

This is a short cut for \expandafter\capitalisewords\expandafter{⟨text⟩}.

Examples:

1. \capitalisewords{a book of rhyme.}

   produces: A Book Of Rhyme.

2. \capitalisewords{a book\space of rhyme.}

   produces: A Book of Rhyme.

3. \newcommand{\mytitle}{a book\space of rhyme.}  
   \capitalisewords{\mytitle}

   produces: A BOOK OF RHYME. (No expansion is performed on \mytitle, so ⟨text⟩ consists of just one “word”.) Compare with next example:

4. \newcommand{\mytitle}{a book\space of rhyme.}  
   \xcapitalisewords{\mytitle}

   produces: A Book of Rhyme.

As from v1.09, you can specify words which shouldn’t be capitalised unless they occur at the start of ⟨text⟩ using:

This only has a local effect. The global version is:

For example:

produces:
The Wind In The Willows
The Wind in the Willows
The list of words that shouldn’t be capitalised can be cleared using

The package mfirstuc-english loads mfirstuc and uses \MFUnocap to add common English articles and conjunctions, such as “a”, “an”, “and”, “but”. You may want to add other words to this list, such as prepositions, but as there’s some dispute over whether prepositions should be capitalised, I don’t intend to add them to this package.

If you want to write a similar package for another language, all you need to do is create a file with the extension .sty that starts with

The next line should identify the package. For example, if you have called the file mfirstuc-french.sty then you need:

It’s a good idea to also add a version in the final optional argument, for example:

Next load mfirstuc:

Now add all your \MFUnocap commands. For example:

At the end of the file add:

Put the file somewhere on TEX’s path, and now you can use this package in your document. You might also consider uploading it to CTAN in case other users find it useful.

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3 UTF-8

The \makefirstuc command works by utilizing the fact that, in most cases, TEX doesn’t require a regular argument to be enclosed in braces if it only consists of a single token. (This is why you can do, say, \frac12 instead of \frac{1}{2} or x^2 instead of x^{2}, although some users frown on this practice.)

A simplistic version of the \makefirstuc command is:

Here \FirstUC{abc} is equivalent to \MakeUppercase abc and since \MakeUppercase requires an argument, it grabs the first token (the character “a” in this case) and uses that as the argument so that the result is: Abc.

The glossaries package needs to take into account the fact that the text may be contained in the argument of a formatting command, such as \acronymfont, so \makefirstuc has to be more complicated than the trivial \FirstUC shown above, but at its basic level, \makefirstuc uses this same method and is the reason why, in most cases, you don’t need to enclose the first character in braces. So if \MakeUppercase ⟨stuff ⟩ works, then \makefirstuc{⟨stuff ⟩} should also work and so should \makefirstuc{\foo{⟨stuff ⟩}}, but if \MakeUppercase ⟨stuff ⟩ doesn’t work, then neither will \makefirstuc{⟨stuff ⟩} (or \makefirstuc{\foo{⟨stuff ⟩}}).

Try the following document:

This will result in the error:

This is why \makefirstuc{ãbc} won’t work. It will only work if the character ã is placed inside a group.

The reason for this error message is due to TEX having been written before Unicode was invented. Although ã may look like a single character in your text editor, from TEX’s point of view it’s two tokens. So

Note that XeTeX (and therefore XeLaTeX) is a modern implementation of TEX designed to work with Unicode and therefore doesn’t suffer from this drawback. Now let’s look at the XeLaTeX equivalent of the above example:

This works correctly when compiled with XeLaTeX. This means that \makefirstuc{ãbc} will work provided you use XeLaTeX and the fontspec package.