latex for writing books & essays

I'm planning on using the latex skills that I've been practicing in vim to the English classes I'm taking next semester. Have you lainions tried that for your college classes? Also how should format the bibliography to adhere to the mla standards of today.

\usepackage{mla} then RTFM. Whatever you want, there's a package for that! TeX/LaTeX is a huge ecosystem, and everything that can be done has already been done. The only issue is, each package has its own quirks and dirty hacks are needed if you need to various functionalities.

LaTeX should work fine for basically any sort of writing. Although, if the structure is not particularly complex, I would be tempted to just write in Markdown or something and use Pandoc to render it to TeX or PDF. Pandoc even lets you embed raw TeX in your document and it will render it just fine, >Also how should format the bibliography to adhere to the mla standards of today. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/44888/how-can-i-create-bibliography-in-mla-format-with-bibtex I dunno if it's totally up-to-date, but the top answer there (as of mid 2016) suggests the biblatex-mla package

>>163 >just write in Markdown or something and use Pandoc this. If you don't need complex bibliography or mathematical symbols, there's no need for LaTeX. Things like presentation slides can be easily done through markdown. But, if you'll use, at least enable the microtype package for good typography rendering: \usepackage{microtype} You can also use Beamer to do the presentation, although, as I said, it's simpler to just go with markdown.

>>164 using a new implementation such as XeLaTeX/XeTeX is helpful too.

While my knowledge of LaTeX/TeX is not vast, it's usage during college was my life basicly. What other Lainons said, you may want to use Markdown. I gave three talks this year (6 hours in total, all done in Beamer) to introduce my peers to the TeX world, and my longer essays in Latex. However, Markdown will always be easier, and if you plan on writing your work with others, Markdown won't scare them. As an idea worth sharing. I know you used vim and tried to get used to it, I am not trying to change that. But Emacs/org-mode is fantastic (exports to latex, markdown, etc). And the writing setup in it is much nicer (due to the ui) than in vim. Don't get me wrong, I use vis (vi improved improved, still under heavy development) to program, but org-mode/Emacs feels better for writing, especially with more complex documents, and you can always go the evil way.

>>164 >>163 I agree with these Lainons, that's how I write most of my writing papers, and probably will from now on for assignments that don't require a cover sheet like engineering (I'll probably just copy it in afterwards anyway). I write a soykafton anyway, so I write everything in Scrivener, which has a handy function to convert markdown to LaTeX documents. Once that's done, just clean it up and submit.

As an English major, is it worth it to learn LATEX?

>>1122 I like it for easy citations and footnotes, but other than that it's just a matter of A E S T H E T I C, as long as a cover sheet isn't required (Journalism major).

>>1143 >as long as a cover sheet isn't required I got hit with this problem but found a tool that can combine PDFs into a single PDF. If you are submitting it printed though it obviously doesn't matter at all.

>>1122 Well I dunno how restricted you are as an English major but if you're free to choose the software you write with I'd say yes. Latex is for those people who do not want to move their hand away from the keyboard while writing. Apperantly this doesn't bother many people but I hate when I have to pause to move my hands around find my mouse and then click something instead of just typing what I want. Check out Luke Smiths (he's in linguistics) YouTube Channel for comfy LaTeX videos.

>>1122 It makes you look pretty professional in some circles, especially academia. Just make sure you're formatting it aesthetically.