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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}
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1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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

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8
  • 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, 2012 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, 2012 at 5:52
  • 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, 2012 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, 2012 at 15:05
  • @Jakob You compiled my example as-is? (BTW, I'm using latexmk, too.)
    – lockstep
    Sep 28, 2012 at 15:06

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