Your curriculum in LaTeX - part one

Posted September 18, 2007 * Comments(12)

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:

PLAIN TEXT
  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

PLAIN TEXT
  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"

PLAIN TEXT
  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:

PLAIN TEXT
  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"

PLAIN TEXT
  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/ [↩]

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