What's the most straightforward way to typeset MLA-style college essays in LaTeX?

Question

I've been using LaTeX for a little while now to typeset my algorithms homework, and I really like the quality of the output as well as the ease-of-use. I'd like to starting using LaTeX in other classes as well, but non–computer-science subjects have more stringent formatting requirements than I've come across in CS. Most classes that require essays want them to be formatted in MLA style, but I'm not sure what to best way to do that using LaTeX is. I've tried Googling "latex mla" and other similar things, but I've found many different MLA templates, and my LaTeX skills aren't good enough to determine which is the best. Is anyone else using LaTeX for "normal" essays, and, if so, how are you doing it?

Answer 1

This is definitely one of the problems with latex at the moment - it's hard to create exact document styles from scratch.

It may be that your school has templates somewhere - my uni certainly had them.

I would have thought the MLA package on CTAN was likely to be of high quality: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/mla-paper/

(CTAN is the TeX network, and it's useful for finding more packages)

Answer 2

You should google "bibtex mla" since bibtex handles references and biblographic information. My first google turned up http://www.reed.edu/cis/help/latex/bibtexstyles.html, which shows an MLA formatted style that looks correct (I was an english major :P, I wish I would have known about latex in college)

EDIT: This site looks awesome: put in the ISBN number, and then you can export straight to the bibtex format. Wish I would have had this in college too, as manual formatting of refs always took me a long time and it was annoying as all hell. http://www.ottobib.com/