[OS X TeX] MLA-style Template

[Alan Munn]

On Mar 31, 2010, at 1:16 AM, Richard J Benish wrote:

>> 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.

Especially with bibdesk as your reference manager, working with bibtex  
isn't that hard.  Have you never created a bibliography in latex at  
all before?  If you have, then getting an annotated bibliography isn't  
that hard to do.

>
> 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.

But I don't think there's a lot of tinkering to be done.  But if you  
mean typing references manually into your source document, then, yes,  
LaTeX isn't good for that.  But even with Word it would make sense to  
learn to use a reference manager so that you don't have to keep  
retyping all your references.

Alan


-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com




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