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MLA without biblatex-mla

I'd like to set a document conforming to the MLA style. As I was recommended elsewhere, I don't want to do this with biblatex-mla, but instead use the more robust styles that come shipped with biblatex, in this case authortitle-ticomp.

What I've done so far

Not striving to do a 100% complete reimplementation, I'd be quite satisfied if the inline citations would adhere as close as possible to the MLA guidelines.

I have so far done the following changes:

  1. removed the pagination prefix
  2. removed "ibid"
  3. removed the \postnotedelim

The problem starts here

and 3. is exactly what causes me (small) headaches: Since I redefined (or rather, deleted) \postnotedelim I have no space between the title and the page field in the citation. In subsequent citations, this is fine, as there is no space needed (see minimal example). It is no big problem to insert an extra space in the postnote before the page number, but there surely must be a way to circumvent this?

Other than that, do you have any other suggestions to adhere closer to mla style while still employing authortitle-ticomp?

Minimal example

\documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[british]{babel}
\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authortitle-ticomp]{biblatex}

% 1. delete pagination prefix
\DeclareFieldFormat{postnote}{#1}
% 3. delete "ibid" in subsequen quotes
\DefineBibliographyStrings{british}{%
ibidem = {{}{}}}
% 3. delete comma and space in front of pagenumber
\renewcommand*{\postnotedelim}{}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@BOOK{jmcdis,
author = {J. M. Coetzee},
title = {Disgrace},
year = {2000},
publisher = {Vintage},
location = {London}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}
\begin{document}
"Lucy's secret; his disgrace" \autocite[109]{jmcdis}. And a subsequent
citation \autocite[110]{jmcdis}.
\end{document}
Community
  • 1
Jakob
  • 333

1 Answers1

3

Instead of tinkering with the ibidem bibstring, redefine the cite:ibid bibmacro.

\documentclass{scrartcl}

\usepackage[backend=biber,style=authortitle-ticomp]{biblatex}

\DeclareFieldFormat{postnote}{#1}

\renewcommand*{\postnotedelim}{\addspace}

\renewbibmacro*{cite:ibid}{%
%  \printtext[bibhyperref]{\bibstring[\mkibid]{ibidem}}% DELETED
  \ifloccit
    {\global\booltrue{cbx:loccit}}
    {}}

\usepackage{filecontents}

\begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib}
@BOOK{jmcdis,
author = {J. M. Coetzee},
title = {Disgrace},
year = {2000},
publisher = {Vintage},
location = {London}
}
\end{filecontents}

\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
"Lucy's secret; his disgrace" \autocite[109]{jmcdis}. And a subsequent
citation \autocite[110]{jmcdis}.
\end{document}

enter image description here

lockstep
  • 250,273
  • Thank you for your answer, but if I try this, I get the following: "Lucy's secret; his disgrace" (Coetzee 109). And a subsequent citation ( ). – Jakob Sep 27 '12 at 21:47
  • Try to delete al auxiliary file and compile again. Also make sure tu use the current versions of biblatex/Biber. If it still doesn't work, you must be doing something different in your actual document. – lockstep Sep 28 '12 at 05:52
  • Strange, I'm using Archlinux (which is normally quite bleeding edge), texlive-core is 2012.26898 and texlive-bibtexextra is 2012.26868. But biblatex is still 1.7 2011/11/13 and biber is only 0.9.9 That'll probably be the culprits… I'll see how to update that. Thankn you! – Jakob Sep 28 '12 at 11:06
  • This is weird. After hours of work I got biblatex 2.2 (17/08/2012) and biber 1.2 on my system. After running pdflatex, biber, pdflatex on the file, I get exactly the same result as in my first comment. What am I doing wrong here? First I thought it might have sth to do with me using latexmk, but that doesn't seem to be the problem. – Jakob Sep 28 '12 at 15:05
  • @Jakob You compiled my example as-is? (BTW, I'm using latexmk, too.) – lockstep Sep 28 '12 at 15:06
  • Yes, I copied it several times but to no avail. As I tried it with texmaker and it worked there, I was close to desperation, but then I found the culprit: When I pasted yours to texmaker, saved the file, opened & compiled it in vim, it worked… seems to have been a copy & paste issue (although vimdiff between that version and the one I pasted it into vim directly, doesn't show a diff between the files… nevertheless, it works and thus, the first of my questions has now been solved! Thanks! If there's anybody out there having other suggestions, I'd be happy to receive them! – Jakob Sep 28 '12 at 16:37
  • Ok, I should stop commenting on this issue, but I just wanted to inform you that it (empty brackets in successive citations) now happened again while writing in my usual environment (vim + latexbox) and I got rid of it by running it once through texmaker's latexmk config. I'll post more here if I know what is causing this behaviour. – Jakob Sep 28 '12 at 20:16
  • Here, Audrey posted a redefinition of the cite:ibid macro that does some checks and alterations regarding postnote and prenote definitions and might be worthwhile to replace yours as it is just a few lines longer? Or do you prefer me posting it as an additional answer as it generally helps adhering closer to using MLA style with authortitle-ticomp? @lockstep – Jakob Mar 02 '13 at 21:48