Your curriculum in LaTeX - part three

Posted April 13, 2008

This is the third part of the tutorial. You can find here the second part.

In the first part of the tutorial we took care of the title of the resume; in the second part we organized the sections, using an appropriate style. Now it's time to properly format the pages and add a decent footer. To do so, I installed and used KOMA-Script. It is a powerful bundle of LaTeX classes and packages and, as stated in its guide: its primary purpose is to provide more-flexible alternatives to the standard classes. It includes the scrpage2 package to customise the document page header and footer, improved and enhanced successor of scrpage.

So, let's change the \documentclass to use KOMA. Also, include the package scrpage2:

  1. \documentclass[a4paper, oneside, final]{scrartcl}
  2.  
  3. \usepackage{soul}
  4. \usepackage{scrpage2}
  5. \usepackage{titlesec}
  6.  
  7. \titleformat{\section}{\large\scshape\raggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
  8.  
  9. \begin{document}
  10. \begin{center}
  11.  
  12. \textsc{\Huge{\so{Iulius Caesar}}}
  13.  
  14. \section{Experiences}
  15. \section{Skills}
  16. \section{Education}
  17. \section{Publications}
  18. \section{Personal Info}
  19. \section{Languages}
  20. \section{Interests}
  21.  
  22. \end{center}
  23. \end{document}

As you can see from the result page, the are some adjustments regarding the margins.

The page with KOMA class

Still, no big differences. So, we proceed to set the footer to replace the page numbers in the bottom of the page with something more appropriate for a resume: the contact data. To do so, we will use the commands \pagestyle{scrheadings} and \cofoot. In this way:

  1. \documentclass[a4paper, oneside, final]{scrartcl}
  2.  
  3. \usepackage{soul}
  4. \usepackage{scrpage2}
  5. \usepackage{titlesec}
  6.  
  7. \titleformat{\section}{\large\scshape\raggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
  8.  
  9. % enable customized headers and footers
  10. \pagestyle{scrheadings}
  11.  
  12. % define footer
  13. \cofoot{Liefdestraat, 7 - 1234LI, Amsterdam, Nederland\\
  14. jeff@gmail.com \  +31 (0)6 12345678}
  15.  
  16. \begin{document}
  17. \begin{center}
  18.  
  19. \textsc{\Huge{\so{Iulius Caesar}}}
  20.  
  21. \section{Experiences}
  22. \section{Skills}
  23. \section{Education}
  24. \section{Publications}
  25. \section{Personal Info}
  26. \section{Languages}
  27. \section{Interests}
  28.  
  29. \end{center}
  30. \end{document}

Take a look at the result page:

The page with the customized footer

Let's focus on the footer, because the default appearance is not enough.

The zoomed footer

The first thing to do is to change the font shape of the footer, redefining the command \headfont, so the latex code becomes:

  1. \documentclass[a4paper, oneside, final]{scrartcl}
  2.  
  3. \usepackage{soul}
  4. \usepackage{scrpage2}
  5. \usepackage{titlesec}
  6.  
  7. \titleformat{\section}{\large\scshape\raggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
  8.  
  9. \pagestyle{scrheadings}
  10.  
  11. % specify the font family for headers and footers
  12. \renewcommand{\headfont}{\normalfont\rmfamily\scshape}
  13.  
  14. \cofoot{Liefdestraat, 7 - 1234LI, Amsterdam, Nederland\\
  15. jeff@gmail.com \  +31 (0)6 12345678}
  16.  
  17. \begin{document}
  18. \begin{center}
  19.  
  20. \textsc{\Huge{\so{Iulius Caesar}}}
  21.  
  22. \section{Experiences}
  23. \section{Skills}
  24. \section{Education}
  25. \section{Publications}
  26. \section{Personal Info}
  27. \section{Languages}
  28. \section{Interests}
  29.  
  30. \end{center}
  31. \end{document}

The footer now looks like the following:

The footer with changed font shape

As we did with other important pieces of this document, we can use the command \so from the Soul package, in this way:

  1. \documentclass[a4paper, oneside, final]{scrartcl}
  2.  
  3. \usepackage{soul}
  4. \usepackage{scrpage2}
  5. \usepackage{titlesec}
  6.  
  7. \titleformat{\section}{\large\scshape\raggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
  8.  
  9. \pagestyle{scrheadings}
  10.  
  11. \renewcommand{\headfont}{\normalfont\rmfamily\scshape}
  12.  
  13. % the so command to expand the text
  14. \cofoot{\so{Liefdestraat, 7 - 1234LI, Amsterdam, Nederland}\\
  15. \so{jeff@gmail.com \  +31 (0)6 12345678}}
  16.  
  17. \begin{document}
  18. \begin{center}
  19.  
  20. \textsc{\Huge{\so{Iulius Caesar}}}
  21.  
  22. \section{Experiences}
  23. \section{Skills}
  24. \section{Education}
  25. \section{Publications}
  26. \section{Personal Info}
  27. \section{Languages}
  28. \section{Interests}
  29.  
  30. \end{center}
  31. \end{document}

The result is now much better:

The footer with more spaces

And now, the final touch! Go, grab and install the Marvosym package. It contains fonts with a lot of symbols1. The idea is to specify the symbols for email and phone contact data, to provide visual hints.
To do so, we will use the command \Letter and \Telefon. Also, to increase the size of the symbols, we will use the \Large modifier, all enclosed in curly brakets (to limit the scope of the command, otherwise also the text will be enlarged.)
So, the latex code becomes:

  1. \documentclass[a4paper, oneside, final]{scrartcl}
  2.  
  3. \usepackage{soul}
  4. \usepackage{scrpage2}
  5. \usepackage{titlesec}
  6. \usepackage{marvosym}
  7.  
  8. \titleformat{\section}{\large\scshape\raggedright}{}{0em}{}[\titlerule]
  9.  
  10. \pagestyle{scrheadings}
  11.  
  12. \renewcommand{\headfont}{\normalfont\rmfamily\scshape}
  13.  
  14. % add the symbols for email and phone contact data
  15. \cofoot{\so{Liefdestraat, 7 - 1234LI, Amsterdam, Nederland}\\
  16. \so{ {\Large\Letter} jeff@gmail.com \ {\Large\Telefon} +31 (0)6 12345678}}
  17.  
  18. \begin{document}
  19. \begin{center}
  20.  
  21. \textsc{\Huge{\so{Iulius Caesar}}}
  22.  
  23. \section{Experiences}
  24. \section{Skills}
  25. \section{Education}
  26. \section{Publications}
  27. \section{Personal Info}
  28. \section{Languages}
  29. \section{Interests}
  30.  
  31. \end{center}
  32. \end{document}

The result is the following:

The footer with the symbols

To recap, in this part of the tutorial we adjusted the page format using KOMA-Script, then we added and customized the footer. The following picture shows the steps we took in the customization:

The footer comparison

That's all folks. See you in seven years for the fourth part.

  1. Take a look at the Marvosym documentation to discover which symbols are available and how to specify them in your document [↩]

9 Comments so far

  1. Nicholas on September 10th, 2008

    This introduction is awesome! But does it end? We’re looking forward to Part 4,5…

  2. kindoblue on September 10th, 2008

    Hi, I ended with: “see you in seven years for the fourth part” :-) Ok, hope to speed up a little bit. But yes, the tutorial will be completed.

  3. Giulio Petrucci on October 20th, 2008

    Hi there,

    Compiling the example above I got this:

    Undefined control sequence \def@onesidehead in scrpage2.sty. Coul you help me? I’m currently working on miktek.

  4. kindoblue on October 20th, 2008

    Hi Giulio,

    I’ve installed MikTex (normally I use Kile LiveTex on Linux) and I looked into your problem. Basically the scrpage2 conflits with titlesec. Just load scrpage2 BEFORE titlesec and all should work. I will correct the code if there are no side effects on LiveTex

    Bye

  5. Giulio Petrucci on October 21st, 2008

    Great! I’ve just tested your suggestion and everything seems to work fine. Now I’d really need to make footer font smaller, in order to place in the second line *2* phone numbers and a long e-mail address. Any suggestion?
    Thanks in advance!

  6. Josh on December 4th, 2008

    Any chance you could post the resume tex file before you finish the tutorial? I’m working on my resume right now and this is the best-looking template I’ve seen. Thanks for the tutorial so far!

  7. Writing Your Professional CV with LaTeX | The CV Inn on July 11th, 2009

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  9. Abhijith on December 29th, 2009

    Your tutorial is awesome! Can you upload the tex file for your sample pdf please?

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