Your curriculum in LaTeX - part one

Posted September 18, 2007

It happened many times: I changed employer and I had to update my resume. What always bothered me was struggling with table layouts, misalignments and other problems you may encounter using a WYSIWYG1 editor. So, few weeks ago I decided to explore other viable solutions and I finally took the (right) decision to use LaTeX. Here you can find an interesting article highlighting the main differences between LaTeX and Microsoft Word (and OpenOffice Writer)

Using LaTeX, I quickly managed to come up with a decent resume. I removed most of my data out, to make a sample.

Sample page

I will describe the LaTeX code to obtain the same results, if you like the layout. The sample pdf file is here.)

Disclaimer: before proceeding, I would like to highlight that I am far from being an expert of LaTeX. As a matter of fact, I am just a beginner. I assume you know how to install LaTeX for your platform and how to add packages. If not, you can find a lot of tutorials about the matter.

LaTeX is a macro language for the TeX typesetting engine by Donald Knuth. Basically is a markup language, like XML. You write your document with a text editor and then you process through LaTeX, which will typeset the document.

The simplest document you can write is the following:

  1. \documentclass{article}
  2. % this is a comment. In this
  3. % part, the preamble, you
  4. % place global commands and
  5. % specifications
  6. \begin{document}
  7. % this is the body of the document
  8. Hello World!
  9. \end{document}

If you save the above statements in a text file and use it as input to LaTeX, you will get a document with "Hello World" written in the upper left corner of the page.

Now, back to our resume, we want to start the document with our name, centered in the page. To do so, we write

  1. \documentclass{article}
  2. \begin{document}
  3.  
  4. \begin{center}
  5. % here we are inside an environment
  6. % what it is written inside is effected by
  7. % the environment parameter(s)
  8. % in this case, the text is centered
  9. Iulius Caesar
  10. \end{center}
  11.  
  12. \end{document}

The result is the following:
First draft of our resume
The name is centered but is too small to read, so we use the command "\Huge"

  1. \documentclass{article}
  2. \begin{document}
  3.  
  4. \begin{center}
  5. \Huge{Iulius Caesar}
  6. \end{center}
  7.  
  8. \end{document}

We get now

The name is clearly visible, now. Yet, we can improve the appearance of this part. To do so, install the package Soul.2 This package provides hyphenatable letterspacing, often used as a form of emphatizing the text.
Once we installed the package in our LaTeX distribution, we can include it in our document and use the command "\so". The document becomes the following:

  1. \documentclass{article}
  2.  
  3. \includepackage{soul}
  4.  
  5. \begin{document}
  6.  
  7. \begin{center}
  8. \so{\Huge{Iulius Caesar}}
  9. \end{center}
  10.  
  11. \end{document}

Now the title of the resume appears like this:
Title with letterspacing
Still, the emphasis is not enough. So, we can use small caps, with the command "\textsc"

  1. \documentclass{article}
  2.  
  3. \includepackage{soul}
  4.  
  5. \begin{document}
  6.  
  7. \begin{center}
  8. \textsc{\so{\Huge{Iulius Caesar}}}
  9. \end{center}
  10.  
  11. \end{document}

I hope you like your new resume title
Resume title with small caps
Hereafter we can see how we transformed the title for emphasis
Comparison
In the second part of the tutorial we will change the page format and we will add the section headers.

See you in 7 years.

  1. For the few don't know, the acronym WYSIWYG stands for What You See Is What You Get (And Nothing More, someone smart used to add) [↩]
  2. http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/soul/ [↩]

11 Comments so far

  1. brother_gc on September 19th, 2007

    Hoei…
    Ci scrissi la tesi in latex, a parte le bestemmie iniziali il risultato é ottimo. Buona parte della cominitá scientifica universitaria lo usa.

    Buona scelta e buon utilizzo!

  2. Pistoiese on September 20th, 2007

    e` la prima volta che ne sento parlare (naturalmente non posso sapere tutto..he he he),ma ora vado a informarmi .
    complimenti per il blog

    naturalmente non ve ne frega niente, ma anch’Io ho aperto un blog
    http://lucaguarnieri-toscaninelmondo.blogspot.com/

  3. Eyolf on September 21st, 2007

    Nice presentation. I should point out, though, that formatting the name the way you have done, with \textsc{\so{\Huge{Iulius Caesar}}}, isn’t that different from the wysiwyg practice of doing everything with manual formatting in the document itself. A more LaTeX-ish way would be to define a new command in the preamble, something like:

    \newcommand{CurrName}{\textsc{\so{\Huge{#1}}}

    and then use \CurrName{Iulius Caesar} in the document. For a one-time heading, this is perhaps overkill, but it is good practice: say you wanted to use the same layout for another curriculum. Then you could just copy the preamble (or make a package out of it), and not worry about the formatting ever again.

    Looking forward to the rest of the article :-) Good luck!

  4. Your curriculum in LaTeX - part two | Minimalia on November 10th, 2007

    […] is the second part of the tutorial. You can find here the first […]

  5. bongo on November 11th, 2007

    Bella Kindo, sembra proprio professional. Non e’ che metti anche il template in latex che hai usato ? Dato che l’ora fatidica della fine del mio contratto incombe, mio malgrado mi tocca rispolverare il CV :(

  6. Marius on August 21st, 2008

    Congratulations, after searching in internet, to be honest, this was the best CV done with Latex that I have seen.

  7. shammash on October 21st, 2008

    In Europe there is a standard for CVs, you can use “europecv” package: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/europecv/

  8. Curriculum in LaTeX / Melodycode.com - Life is a flash on October 21st, 2008

    […] dovrò scrivere un altro curriculum seguirò le indicazioni di Stefano che nel suo blog spiega come crearlo in LaTeX (è composto da 4 parti per ora). LaTeX è un linguaggio di markup sconosciuto a molti ma che viene […]

  9. Luuk on April 12th, 2009

    I have to use \usepackage instead of \includepackage what’s the difference?

  10. Mohamed on July 9th, 2009

    If you use the \so{\Huge\{whatever}} and you get a black box at the output, just type before the document begin
    \soulregister{\Huge}{1} and the error will go.

  11. Bryce Thomas on August 19th, 2009

    I’m following along with your post, constructing my resume. Couple of things I’ve noted - in your sample source code you’ve got \includepackage{soul}, which didn’t work for me. I had to use \usepackage{soul}. I’m not sure if one is wrong and the other is right or whether the statement varies based on what you’re using to compile it, but if anyone else comes across this problem, give \usepackage{soul} a go.

    Mohamed made a note about \so{\Huge\{whatever}} not working and suggested adding the \soulregister statement like he’s shown above. I had this problem as well, but had an error message come up to tell me “Reconstruction failed etc etc” before I even got to looking at the document. Just as a quick note, another way around this problem is to have \so as the innermost nested statement, so instead of \so{Huge\{whatever}} you put \huge{\so{whatever}} instead. This way you’re not changing font to huge inside of the \so braces, which I think is what causes it to stuff up.

    Eyolf has commented above about how to use \newcommand to further separate the formatting from the content. I tried to use this, but found it didn’t work. With a small tweak but, I got it working with the following:

    \newcommand{\CurrName}[1]
    {
    \textsc{\huge{\so{#1}}}
    }

    Cheers, Bryce.

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