Write a Resume in LaTeX

While Microsoft Word can be great, when it comes to writing technical documents like engineering reports, Word is irritating to say the least. LaTeX is a technical document creation program that allows engineers to write technical document without all that worry about formatting. This tutorial will let you create a simple resume in LaTeX in order to give a general introduction to creating LaTeX documents. Here is what you will create.

Steps

Sample Resume and LaTeX Code

Doc:LaTeX Resume,LaTeX Resume Template

Writing a Resume in LaTeX

  1. The first step is to download a free copy of a LaTeX editor. Although any LaTeX editor should work. This article is written specifically for TeXworks.
  2. When you open up Tex Works you should see a screen like this:
  3. Change the top left menu to pdfLaTeX: I also would suggest going into Format/Syntax Highlighting and selecting LaTeX, as this will make your code easier to read.

Set Up the Document

  1. In LaTeX, you have to set up each of the margins manually, which can seem tedious at first. However if you have too much information or too little, these settings can be easily adjusted to make your document look its best. This can be done with the following code:

Begin the Document

  1. The next step is to actually begin your document. In LaTeX this is done by simply inserting the following code:

Make the Header

  1. In LaTeX you write your document in the same manner that would would in Word, except you have to use commands like:

  1. The return key also plays a key role in designing LaTeX documents. If you return twice as if to make a new paragraph, LaTeX will treat that as a new paragraph and ignore any formatting code used for the previous paragraph. We will see how this comes in handy later.
  2. At this point your document should look like this:

Making the Body

  1. The next part of your resume should be some simple objective and summary type sections. This can easily be accomplished by making headers and following them with text. Here is an example:

  1. Below are examples of how your text should look in LaTex and how your document should look so far:

Extra Helpful Commands

  1. While this may look a little bit silly on the sample resume we created, it serves the purpose of demonstrating how you can make columns in LaTeX. In order to do a list of known programming languages I used the following command:

  1. Here is a sample of \hfill using the following code:

  1. Repeat these last 4 lines for each section you want to add.
  2. Here is a look at the code and the product after you add in these lines:


Finishing Up

  1. Now all you need to do to finish the resume is add in more sections (using the same steps show above), tweak your dimensions, and it never hurts to have a professional look at it to make sure you did a good job. I hope this is helpful to whoever decides to use it, and I hope it will inspire more people to start learning LaTeX as it can be a great skill to have.

Tips

  • The first line (\documentclass) is necessary to tell LaTeX what you want type of default style you want.
  • There are better ways to do columns (in terms of formatting), however, they are not discussed in this article
  • In LaTeX everything with a "\" is a command and everything that comes after a "%" is a comment and thus won't show up in your document.

Related Articles

Sources and Citations

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