I did it! I did it! I did it! Or - to put it in words more accurately describing the process: I, with the patient help of quite a few real and virtual persons did it.
Here is the preamble (and some text) of my very own customized LaTeX paper-template - following the citation guidelines of the bloody Wr. Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte. It looks positively cute. And it took me more than a week to finish. It's not very complex, which hautingly shows what a total computer-looser I am. I honestly downloaded and installed every single LaTeX-package (programs? implementations? things that help you - for example - to define your page-layout) by myself in my wonderful TDS-conform directory tree before someone told me that every good LaTeX-distribution already got them. How could I possibly know if they don't show up on my HD?
So ... I guess that's the point where even readers with the best of intentions loose any spark of interest.



Better now?
I know how futile it is to be an advocate for LaTeX (die, Word!) because I'm nearly the last one who is still not done with her thesis and using it in the humanities for articles/books seems not the best of ideas - no journal/publisher is going to accept it (we're kind of a dark and negative universe to hard sciences' fluffy realm of LaTeX love).
So if I can't campaign for LaTeX I can campaign for the use of a bibliographic reference manager* working with Word (that doesn't feel nearly as cool - it's like campaigning for John Edwards even though you're a member of the Socialist Party USA).

It

• fetches the literature from online sources (libraries) -
  I knew there was a way superior to copy and pasting the catalogue entry
• arranges it via keywords, (smart)folders and every other possible entry-field
• and in Word you can simply cite via a shortkey assigned to every publication (e.g. durkh1897). The tedious rest - Have I cited it before? Can I use the shorttitle now? Ebd., vgl. Anm. X) is taken care of (or so I hope, if it works anything like the LaTeX/BibTeX interaction does).

Here - PStiepolo2 (pdf, 388 KB) - is the PDF of a PS-paper I wrote during my 3rd semester (of art history, duh) - reworked with LaTeX. I think it looks nearly as gorgeous as the raw-file. Ignore the first page, I just experimented with colour. And I use InDesign for my first pages anyway - you can't totally disguise were you came from.


*Something the likes of Endnote or BibWord, just free.

p.s.: I just read that some PDF-viewers could display some fonts somewhat raggedly - there is a fix for that, but I'm too tired now to try. If I have to consult one more manual or FAQ I'll go crazy for sure. I'm using Skim (a Mac app) as my default PDF reader (and have no problems at all). Download it, it's a good one.