Biblatex-MLA 0.2
For a long time, it's seemed that the worlds of Latex, Bibtex, and MLA-style formatting were incompatible. Natbib, the most widely used package for styling citations and bibliographies, is designed to work well for the sciences, but not so well for humanities. Jurabib, designed for the humanities, seemed to be on its way to working well with MLA, but those who preferred MLA's parenthetical citations faced bugs that were hard to track down. Sadly, development on Jurabib has frozen at beta version 0.61.
Its mantle has been taken up by Biblatex, a dynamic package written in easy-to-follow macros. Though also only at beta version 0.6, Biblatex already delivers in some key areas Jurabib was deficient. What's more, the simple macro language of Biblatex allows for its users to define their own styles relatively easily.
Biblatex ships with a bunch of starter styles with the expectation that users will build upon these to suit the whims of different publishing houses. Using these styles as my starting point, I've defined MLA-format citation and bibliography (Works Cited) styles. And knowing that MLA-style formatting is used more in English Literature than Computer Science, I'm making the styles available in hopes of making Latex seem more accessible to those for whom new computer programs seem daunting.
- Download and install Biblatex version 0.6
- Download and install biblatex-mla-02.zip
- Definitions list not complete (film,
edited books, etc.) — definition list improved in 0.2 Author name repeated needlessly in subsequent citations— Idem, Ibidem, and "shorthand" working properly in 0.2
previous version: biblatex-mla-01.zip