Biblatex-MLA 0.3
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 only at version 0.7, Biblatex already delivers in key areas Jurabib was deficient. What's more, the simple macro language of Biblatex allows its users to define 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, making the styles available below.
- Download and install Biblatex version 0.7 (Don't forget to install etoolbox.sty, too. Biblatex 0.7 requires it!)
- Download and install biblatex-MLA-03.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— Regression in 0.3: idems misbehave! I'm on it for 0.4—trust me.