[OS X TeX] MLA-style Template

[Richard J Benish]

>On Mar 30, 2010, at 11:24 PM, Richard J Benish wrote:
>
>>I've been looking for an MLA-style template for a research paper 
>>that should include not only works cited, but also an annotated 
>>bibliography.
>>
>>I've found fragments of what I need but I can't figure out how to 
>>get them to work together.
>>
>>What I would really like to find (and I know must exist somewhere) 
>>is an archive (folder) that contains a sample document and whatever 
>>style files are needed so that I can immediately open the thing and 
>>start substituting the template text for my text. In other words a 
>>totally painless and functional template.
>>
>>Does anyone know where I might find one?
>>
>
>I don't know of such a magical folder, but the biblatex-mla package 
>supports the annotation field in your bibtex database and can be 
>used to generate annotated bibliographies.  Biblatex also supports 
>multiple bibliographies easily, so if your works cited and your 
>annotated bibliography are different you should be able to have both 
>in the same document.
>
>Alan


Thanks Alan. This is one of the fragments that I have found. 
Presently I don't have time to figure out how to use Bibtex, so I'm 
not sure how to take out only the part I need.

There's another more generic mla.sty file that I've found and a 
document that is formatted in MLA style but does not use the .sty 
file. Neither of these comes with any info about generating an 
annotated bibliography.

Since I'm in a bit of a hurry to get going on it, I've brought my 
text into a Word file. I'd much rather do the work in LaTex. Clunky 
as Word is in its various ways, it's so much easier to figure out for 
this kind of situation.

Frankly, I find it frustrating that this situation exists. As long as 
it does, I suppose LaTex will retain only a kind of "cult" following 
of geeky types. I wish I were enough of a geek to happily tinker out 
the template I need. But alas, I am not.

So it goes.

Thanks again.

Rick