biblatex MLA patch
November 28, 2007
As part of finally getting a jump on my dissertation, I’ve been re-learning LaTeX and BibTeX, and learning biblatex, which seems to be the only thing that offers any hope of turning out LaTeX reports that are MLA formatted. Thanks to James Clawson and his bibtex-MLA package, “MLA BibTeX support” is no longer any oxymoron. It’s a godsend. The current release is very usable, but it has trouble with some corner cases. Workarounds are pretty simple using brackets to force formatting behavior, but since I’m going to be using this a lot and I may have to export the records out of BibTeX at some point, I’m patching the style macros as I go along.
So far, I’ve only had two real issues: the default url handling using \mbox and \hfill forced problematic line breaks and justification errors, and books with editors, but not authors, weren’t handled correctly.
Since James hasn’t supplied copyright information for the code or contact information, I’m supplying the changes as a patch against the MLA.bbx in the current 0.2 release, rather than posting the file I’ve patched: MLAbbx02-0020.patch.
If you’re on OS X or Linux, updating should be as simple as downloading the file, opening a terminal window, and typing
$ patch /path/to/your/MLA.bbx /path/to/MLAbbx02-0020.patch
January 5, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Hi Jay,
No worries about changing/modifying/doing whatever you like to the files and re-posting them. I only wanted to share what it was I had working, because I knew how much I *searched* for something to work with latex and MLA-style formatting a year ago (before I knew about biblatex).
I’ve been away from things awhile now (graduation, Christmas, etc.), and now I see biblatex’s been updated, too. I’ll take a look at those changes and these changes you’ve added and re-incorporate for a biblatex-MLA version 0.3 (with accolades and credit listed in the files under your name) if that’s ok with you. You got my email now, so just let me know.
I’m glad you found it helpful for your purposes, too. It tickles me to think that the hours I played around getting things right weren’t for naught!
James