Most humanities departments in the US require that submitted papers be in MLA format. This repository gathers the tools needed for producing MLA-formatted PDFs (or ODTs, or DOCXs) from text files written in Markdown.

In order to automatically generate the nicely-formatted PDFs I've promised you, you will need

• Pandoc,
• LaTeX, and
• Make (GNU or otherwise---should be present by default).

• README.md: the document itself.
• src/mla8.csl: citation style information for MLA from http://citationstyles.org/.
• src/hanging_indent_bib.latex: centers the "Works Cited" header and sets indentation for bibliographic entries.
• src/mla8_pandoc_template.latex, src/mla8_pandoc_template.opendocument, and src/mla8_pandoc_reference.docx: MLA styling for the body of the document.
• references.bib: references (in BibTeX format) go here.
• Makefile: build rules.

1. Write your paper in this README file, using Pandoc's Markdown flavor.
   • Change or delete the values in the YAML header as you see fit; the hauthor variable determines the author name shown in the running header.
   • Add references in BibTeX format to references.bib.
   • Include references in your "Works Cited" without citing them in the body of your paper by adding them, one per line, immediately below nocite: | in the YAML header, as with the reference to @2016pow (@2016pow) in this example document.
2. Execute make pdf.
3. Open output.pdf and regard your work with a measure of sadness as you wonder whether you could have done better.

The lib directory is a handy place to tuck away any extra materials.

If you must, which you may, you can generate an MLA-formatted ODT or DOCX with make odt or make docx.