Well, this is not *The* solution, Certainly true.
1) follow the command by an explicit space `\ ' I added a little text about that (and changed the wording). Committed. 2) Use package xspace, and tail the definition of command by \xspace. I'm not sure about mentioning xspace in our manual here; it's not part of core LaTeX, and can cause hard-to-track-down errors. So I left it out for the moment, though I don't feel that strongly about it. A bigger issue is that the whole story of ignoring spaces after control sequences has nothing to do with \newcommand. Thus the description should be somewhere in the basic syntax description, with an xref in the \newcommand and \typeout nodes. But I couldn't deal with that today. Thanks, Karl