[OS X TeX] Re: LaTeX and APA

[Alan Munn]

On Mar 19, 2011, at 8:29 AM, LuKreme wrote:

> On 18-Mar-2011, at 09:35, Alan Munn wrote:
>> 
>> If you are mainly concerned about the formatting of citations/bibliography, then the biblatex-apa style for biblatex is the most up-to-date that I am aware of. It implements the 6th ed. APA guide.
> 
> OK. Now, when I fire up TeX Live Utility and type in 'apa' in the search field, I get no results. If I put in biblatex I get
> 
> biblatex
> biblatex-chicago
> 
> How do I get biblatex-apa installed correctly with my Mac TeX install?

I'm sure it's installed.  To search for *installed* packages using TeXLive Utility you need to first select Manage Packages (not Manage Updates) before you do the search.

On my system, searching for apa reveals the following:
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> 
>> biblatex-mla is usable with the apa documentclass  if you load it with the [noapacite] option.
> 
> Same question, mla returns no results, so how do I get it installed? And will these packages, once installed, get updated via Tex Live?

Sorry that was a typo; although there is a biblatex-mla, I meant to say biblatex-apa here.
> 
> 
>> Switching from apacite to biblatex is pretty straightforward; you don't need to change you bib file, but you may need to adjust the actual citation commands to match the biblatex-apa cite commands.
> 
> I don't have any existing TeX files to convert. I will be pulling the text out of other documents and putting it into TeXWorks or BBEdit to turn it into LaTeX.
> 
>> There's been a very recent update to biblatex-apa (last few days) so make sure your distribution is up-to-date.
> 
> Mac Tex just updated to ? 0.91, but I sense this is not enough?

This is the version number of TeXLive Utility.  There is no sense in which MacTeX itself has a version number. What I meant was that you should use TeXLive Utility to Update All.

> 
> If I plug in the sample document (I took out the refs to the bibliography for now) to a new document in TeXWorks
> 
>> \documentclass[noapacite]{apa}
>> \usepackage[american]{babel}
>> \usepackage{csquotes}
>> \usepackage[style=apa]{biblatex}
>> \DeclareLanguageMapping{american}{american-apa}
>> \begin{document}
>> 
>> ?
>> 
>> 
>> \end{document}
> 
> I get this on a command-T:
> 
> This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.11 (TeX Live 2010)
> restricted \write18 enabled.
> entering extended mode
> (./apa test.tex
> ! Undefined control sequence.
> l.1 \documentclass
> [noapacite]{apa}

This is because you've used pdfTeX instead of pdfLaTeX to compile your document.  Choose pdfLaTeX from the pulldown menu in the document window.  You can change this to the default in the preferences.
> 
> Also, every time I launch TeXWorks, it defaults to saving in the /Applications/TeX/ folder.

Once you save somewhere else doesn't this get remembered?

Alan

-- 
Alan Munn
amunn at gmx.com