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

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开发者_如何转开发 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?

I know this may seem like a late reply, but I think it would help people who are still seeking a good answer to this question. I found this package online called MLA13 that does everything for you. I used it in quite a few of my papers already. The thing that's good about it is that it uses your .bib files and formats everything according to MLA standards.

The website for this is:

Documentation: https://github.com/jackson13info/mla13/blob/master/Documentation.pdf

Download the Sty File: https://github.com/jackson13info/mla13/blob/master/mla13.sty

Github: https://github.com/jackson13info/mla13

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)

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/