Re: hspace in markup cancels other directives

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Hi Aaron, thanks for that.  I thought I had tried all permutations
> of the order of specifications but I missed that one.  It's hard to
> guess which one is correct.

Is it?  I don't think so.  Just bear in mind whether you have used up
all arguments of a markup command.  In your case,

   \smaller           expects one argument
   \with-color #blue  expects one more argument, thus not finished yet
   \hspace #-3        no more argument is expected, thus the chain of
                      commands stops here: `\smaller \with-color
                      #blue` gets applied to `\hspace #-3`, which
                      doesn't make sense, of course
   text               gets typeset as-is, since the previous commands
                      are already applied


     Werner