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April 25, 2012

Writing a CV in LaTeX

By tom

Writing my curriculum in LaTeX was a task that has been on my TODO-list for quite a while. I liked the style of my Word-written CV and I believed it would take hours to come up with a reasonable CV in LaTeX. Nevertheless, I recently sat down, began writing, and after not too long, I came up with a presentable result that I would like to share.

A complete minimal example can be found at the end of this post.

The Title

In order to even spacing all around, we change the page margins to 3cm using the geometry package. We further make use of the standard article maketitle command, printing the person’s name (title field) and e-mail address (author field).

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=3cm]{geometry}
\title{\bfseries\Huge Tom T. Texblog}
\author{texblog+cv@gmail.com}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\end{document}

In case you prefer to add a photo to your CV, try the following slightly more complex code, using minipage:

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[margin=3cm]{geometry}
\title{\bfseries\Huge Tom T. Texblog}
\author{texblog+cv@gmail.com}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\begin{minipage}{0.65\textwidth}
\begingroup
\let\center\flushleft
\let\endcenter\endflushleft
\maketitle
\endgroup
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}{0.3\textwidth}
\flushright{\rule{3.5cm}{4.5cm}}
\end{minipage}
\end{document}

Address and Personal Information

We use minipage again to split the page into two parts, one for the address and the second for some personal information if that’s required. Straight forward.

\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
Main Road 25\\
City 12345\\
State of Sabotage
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
Nonlandian\\
January 3rd, 2020\\
+12 34 56 789
\end{minipage}

The space between the title and the address is just about right. To add more space, use:

\vspace{2em}

The Content

After the cosmetics, we now add the actual content. We use the standard article section with a star to omit numbering. Sections may include: Objective (of the CV), Professional Experience, Education, Languages, Publications, Programming Languages, etc. We will show a few examples here, the structure is always the same.

Let’s first prepare the content with some code in the preamble. We use the tabular environment to divide the page into two columns, a small column for the year/title and a wide column for the description. In order to minimize typing, we define two new columntypes in the preamble, “L” and “R” as well as a thin light-gray line in between, \VRule.

\usepackage{array, xcolor}
\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\raggedleft}p{0.14\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{p{0.8\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}

Now we can start creating content sections using the tabular environment as follows:

\section*{Heading}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2012&Some text\\[5pt]
2011&Some other text\\
\end{tabular}

For better readability, we add small vertical spaces between rows in the tabular.

Education

Let’s start by looking at the example with education. We highlighted the parts in bold which are most recent or most important.

\section*{Education}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2005--2007&{\bf MSc in Computer Science, Great University, Country.}\\[5pt]
2001--2005&BSc in Life Science, Great University, Country.\\
\end{tabular}

Languages

Here, we use the left column for the language and the right column for the level of proficiency.

\section*{Languages}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
Klingon&Mother tongue\\
{\bf English}&{\bf Fluent}\\
French&Fluent (DELF 2010)\\
Japanese&Fair\\
\end{tabular}

Professional Experience

\usepackage{lipsum}
...
\section*{Professional Experience}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2011--today&{\bf Work at company XY.}\\
&\lipsum[66]\\[5pt]
2008--2010&{\bf Trainee at company ZY.}\\
&\lipsum[66]\\
\end{tabular}


Publications

We use the bibentry package to generate an inline list of publications. The references are stored in a bibtex file.

\usepackage{bibentry}
...
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nobibliography{publication.bib}
\section*{Publications}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2006&\bibentry{knuth2006art}\\[5pt]
1968&\bibentry{lamport1986latex}\\
\end{tabular}

Minimal Example CV

\documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage{array, xcolor, lipsum, bibentry}
\usepackage[margin=3cm]{geometry}

\title{\bfseries\Huge Tom T. Texblog}
\author{texblog+cv@gmail.com}
\date{}

\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\raggedleft}p{0.14\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{p{0.8\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}

\begin{filecontents}{publication.bib}
@article{lamport1986latex,
  title={LaTEX: User's Guide \& Reference Manual},
  author={Lamport, L.},
  year={1986},
  publisher={Addison-Wesley}
}
@book{knuth2006art,
  title={The art of computer programming: Generating all trees: history of combinatorial generation},
  author={Knuth, D.E.},
  volume={4},
  year={2006},
  publisher={addison-Wesley}
}
\end{filecontents}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\vspace{1em}
\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
Main Road 25\\
City 12345\\
State of Sabotage
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
Nonlandian\\
January 3rd, 2020\\
+12 34 56 789
\end{minipage}
\vspace{20pt}

\section*{Objective}
Find a job.

\section*{Professional Experience}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2011--today&{\bf Work at company XY.}\\
&\lipsum[66]\\
\end{tabular}

\section*{Education}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2005--2007&{\bf MSc in Computer Science, Great University, Country.}\\[5pt]
2001--2005&BSc in Life Science, Great University, Country.\\
\end{tabular}

\section*{Languages}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
Klingon&Mother tongue\\
{\bf English}&{\bf Fluent}\\
French&Fluent (DELF 2010)\\
Japanese&Fair\\
\end{tabular}

\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nobibliography{publication.bib}

\section*{Publications}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2006&\bibentry{knuth2006art}\\[5pt]
1986&\bibentry{lamport1986latex}\\
\end{tabular}
{\vspace{20pt}\newline\newline
\vspace{20pt}
\scriptsize\hfill Created by http://texblog.org}

\end{document}

Additional Resources

Drop me a comment if you know of other resources and I will add them to the list.

Update

A few days after publishing this post, a vivid discussion took place with lots of interesting CV examples on hackerne.ws.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2012 at 7:00 am and tagged with , , , , , , , , , , and posted in Bibtex & biblatex, Introduction, LaTeX, Package, Tips & tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

70 Responses to “Writing a CV in LaTeX”

  • jeroendehaas
    April 25th, 2012 at 8:03 am

    For the last three years I’ve used the moderncv package to typeset my CV: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/moderncv. Well worth checking out if you’re considering writing your CV in LaTeX.

    Reply
  • P
    April 25th, 2012 at 9:01 am

    NIce article. For Europe CV, I use the europecv package: http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/europecv.
    Cheers, P.

    Reply
  • nignasi
    April 25th, 2012 at 11:11 am

    I’ve never used but here you have two more links to CV tex templates

    http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

    http://www.latextemplates.com/cat/curricula-vitaes

    Reply
  • henningninneh
    April 25th, 2012 at 11:28 am

    excellent. this looks exactly like my word-typeset cv. now i must give it a try in LaTex. thanks for this post.

    Reply
  • copiancestral
    April 25th, 2012 at 1:32 pm

    It looks good, but I would go with the cv or the moderncv packages. They’re quite easy to use, and yet produce simple but elegant résumés.

    Reply
  • Didier Verna
    April 26th, 2012 at 5:04 am

    Out of completeness, you should also mention the CurVe class (shameless plug). Available on CTAN.

    Reply
  • Gergely Schmidt (@sgergely)
    April 28th, 2012 at 6:27 am

    that is not mother tongue it is native language :D

    Reply
  • Bala
    April 28th, 2012 at 6:35 am

    beautiful!!!

    Reply
  • Professional Resume Using Latex Templates « Abstract Confusions
    April 28th, 2012 at 8:02 am

    [...] Here is an another excellent post discussing   resume. 13.060416 80.249634 Rate this: Sharing is fun:MoreLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. [...]

    Reply
  • akmkat
    April 28th, 2012 at 8:28 am

    Very nice, but the address/personal information does not come as two separate columns. How to fix? Please help.

    Reply
    • tom
      April 30th, 2012 at 4:20 am

      Hi!

      Thanks for your comment. Did you use the minipage environment as in the example above? Please provide a minimal example and I’ll try to help.

      Best, Tom.

      Reply
  • Helios
    April 28th, 2012 at 8:59 am

    For my CV in LaTeX I used another template: http://www.tedpavlic.com/post_resume_cv_latex_example.php

    Reply
  • Learning Latex – Resumes | blog.fejes.ca
    May 12th, 2012 at 1:59 pm

    [...] In any case, what got me started on a resume was a Google+ post that linked to this page: http://texblog.org/2012/04/25/writing-a-cv-in-latex/ [...]

    Reply
  • eiselekd
    May 24th, 2012 at 12:51 pm

    The layout is nice however there a problems I think:
    When using tabular and you have a long list, i.e.
    in the “Practical Experience” section, tabular will
    not break across multiple pages. Also when you add
    footnotes inside tables you need to be an expert. A simpler
    2 column layout would be, it misses the vertical ruler however:

    \documentclass{scrartcl}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\begin{labeling}{XXXXXXX}%template for longest item.
\item[2000] \lipsum[1-2]
\item[2001] \lipsum[1-2]
\end{labeling}
\end{document}
    Reply
    • tom
      May 25th, 2012 at 5:17 am

      Thanks for the sample code. I agree, one may run into problems, but LaTeX almost always provides a reasonable solution. I wrote about footnotes in tables in one of my previous posts. Concerning the multipage issue, often one can arrange things with margins, font size, line spacing, etc. Another possibility would be to use the longtable package instead, which allows tables to span across multiple pages.

      Best, Tom.

      Reply
  • Daniel
    June 7th, 2012 at 5:33 pm

    Thanks for a great post and blog!
    I’m wondering about how to change the indentation of the dates in the first column. Suppose you want to specify the month e.g. 201203 – 201206. This causes a line-break but it seems there is more space to use to the left. What would you do?

    Reply
    • tom
      June 8th, 2012 at 2:19 pm

      Hi Daniel,

      Thanks for your comment. What you would do is to change the width of the manually defined columns. Try for example 0.25\textwidth for L and 0.6\textwidth for R as in the code below.

      \usepackage{array, xcolor}
\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\raggedleft}p{0.25\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{p{0.6\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}

      Best, Tom.

      Reply
  • Daniel
    June 8th, 2012 at 2:57 pm

    Thanks! By the way, is there a way to let the red line come before the first column?

    Reply
    • tom
      June 11th, 2012 at 2:11 am

      Hi Daniel,

      Do you mean a vertical red line? You could color a vrule with the xcolor package:

      \documentclass[10pt]{article}
\usepackage[table]{xcolor}
\usepackage{array, lipsum, bibentry}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage[margin=3cm]{geometry}
\taburulecolor{red}
\title{\bfseries\Huge Tom T. Texblog}
\author{texblog+cv@gmail.com}
\date{}
\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{|>{\raggedleft}p{0.14\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{p{0.8\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}
...

      Changes are highlighted.

      Best, Tom.

      Reply
  • Daniel
    June 11th, 2012 at 5:15 pm

    Nice! Yes, that’s what I meant:), (of course I mean the lightgray line which I changed to red, thus the confusion). I changed \tabular to \tabu and then everything worked perfectly.
    Cheers, Daniel

    Reply
  • crlsmrgf
    July 30th, 2012 at 2:55 pm

    Thank u very much!
    It was also something in my TO-DO list for too long, and it was much ore easy than I thought!

    Reply
  • Alex
    September 10th, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    I’m having trouble getting the publications section to work… Even if I copy your source code exactly, I get and error: “Citation ‘knuth2006art’ undefined”. Any idea how to fix this?

    Reply
    • tom
      September 11th, 2012 at 7:08 am

      Hi Alex,

      Two things:

      • Did you run latex, bibtex, latex, latex?
      • Do you have a publication.bib file containing the bib-entries?

      In case you use the complete example provided in the post, the file will be created when you typeset the document (latex) the first time.

      Hope this helps.
      Best, Tom

      Reply
  • Matt Brown
    September 13th, 2012 at 7:35 pm

    With the publications list, I get a vertical space in front of each of my \bibentry bits, so that the year is a line above the text. If I add some text or “\hspace{0pt}” ahead of it, it jumps back on the right line. This is an ugly hack, though. Any suggestions?

    Reply
    • tom
      September 14th, 2012 at 11:22 am

      Hi Matt,

      Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to reproduce what you describe above. Could you provide a minimal working example? Something similar to the code below would do.

      Thanks, Tom.

      \documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bibentry}
\usepackage{array, xcolor}
\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\raggedleft}p{0.14\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{p{0.8\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}
\begin{filecontents}{publication.bib}
@book{knuth2006art,
  title={The art of computer programming: Generating all trees: history of combinatorial generation},
  author={Knuth, D.E.},
  volume={4},
  year={2006},
  publisher={addison-Wesley}}
\end{filecontents}
\begin{document}
\bibliographystyle{plain}
\nobibliography{publication.bib}
\section*{Publications}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2006&\bibentry{knuth2006art}\vspace{5pt}\\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
      Reply
  • resume formats
    September 25th, 2012 at 7:09 am

    interesting,thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  • Martin Vogel
    October 8th, 2012 at 12:03 pm

    Hi,
    Thanks for your nice CV template.
    I just wonder how to modify the code to include properly a photo in the beginning. I am not very familiar with the minipage environment.
    Thanks in advance
    Martin

    Reply
    • tom
      October 8th, 2012 at 12:20 pm

      Thanks for your question, Martin. That’s fairly simple. Copy-paste the code above in the post which has the photo black box and replace:

      \rule{width}{height}

      with

      \includegraphics[width=3.5cm]{path/photo.png}

      You’ll have to load the graphicx package to make use of the width option.

      Let me know if you have any problems with that and if you provide the code, I’ll most certainly be able to help.

      Cheers, Tom.

      Reply
  • Preparing an Academic CV in LaTeX using Mendeley | Monkeyologist
    October 22nd, 2012 at 11:16 pm

    [...] Blog’s Writing a CV in LaTeX (where I found out about the bibentry [...]

    Reply
  • Jolyon Bloomfield
    December 10th, 2012 at 2:21 am

    Heya,

    Just wanted to point out that the use of “\vspace{5pt}\\” to get nice spacing in the tables can backfire if the \vspace will cause a new line to be added to that row (if your text is _just_ the wrong length). Better is to use “\\[5pt]” which doesn’t have this problem.

    Best,
    Jolyon

    Reply
  • Phil
    December 12th, 2012 at 3:35 am

    Hi there.
    I’m very new to latex so forgive me naive question.

    I noticed that when a section was a bit long it started on a new page leaving sometime a lot of extra white page after the previous section.

    Is it something that can be changed easily?

    Otherwise, thank for the excellent post.

    Reply
    • tom
      December 12th, 2012 at 2:32 pm

      Hi Phil,

      Thanks for your question. You probably have to play around to find the optimal arrangement. However, in general, I would not expect a section to be automatically moved to the next page if there is blank space left on the current page. Unless you add \clearpage or \newpage of course.

      Could you provide a minimal example for illustration?

      Thanks, Tom.

      Reply
    • jolyonbloomfield
      December 13th, 2012 at 4:17 am

      Hi there,

      This happens because LaTeX tries to fit a tabular environment on a single page; it won’t break it across pages. I ran into this same issue recently. The fix is to use the longtable package:

      \usepackage{longtable}

      You probably also want to use these commands in the preamble (otherwise the spacing gets a little big):

      \setlength{\LTpre}{0pt}
\setlength{\LTpost}{0pt}

      Then, wherever \begin{tabular} … \end{\tabular} appears, change it to the following.

      \begin{longtable}
...
\end{longtable}

      I hope this helps!
      Jolyon

      Reply
  • Ben
    December 18th, 2012 at 4:18 pm

    Dear All,

    Thank you for this template. It works really great.

    But I want to add a foot note stating the date and company for wich this Resume is made.

    I’ve been searching the net for how to do this, but I can’t figure out how to get a footer on the first page …

    Is there any good trick to do this?

    Thank you!

    Reply
    • tom
      December 21st, 2012 at 3:45 pm

      Hi Ben,

      Assuming you are using the fancyhdr package and redefined the header/footer according to your needs. Now to get a header/footer on the first page, just add the following line after \maketitle:

      \thispagestyle{fancy}

      You can find more information on redefining header/footer here.

      Best, Tom.

      Reply
  • Johnathan
    January 4th, 2013 at 5:27 pm

    Just wanted to say this is a great guide, many thanks for this.

    Cheers,
    Johnathan

    Reply
  • Rivka
    January 11th, 2013 at 6:29 pm

    Hi,
    I used this as a template to write my CV, thanks!

    Reply
  • dottag
    January 14th, 2013 at 10:01 pm

    Thank you for the awesome CV! This was exactly my Word-style but my limited knowledge of LaTeX did not allow me to do the same.

    One question: how do I make the second column left-justified? I’d loke to do it because I don’t like that LaTeX stretches out the between-words spaces (it’s not an article, so the right margin looks “ragged” anyway).

    Reply
    • tom
      January 15th, 2013 at 6:00 am

      Hello!
      Left-align the right side is done similarly to right-align the left side using \raggedright in the column definition. I attached a minimal working example below.

      \documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor, blindtext, array}
\definecolor{lightgray}{gray}{0.8}
\newcolumntype{L}{>{\raggedleft}p{0.14\textwidth}}
\newcolumntype{R}{>{\raggedright}p{0.8\textwidth}}
\newcommand\VRule{\color{lightgray}\vrule width 0.5pt}
\begin{document}
\section*{Title}
\begin{tabular}{L!{\VRule}R}
2013&\blindtext\\
\end{tabular}
\end{document}
      Reply
  • peddrim
    January 15th, 2013 at 12:53 pm

    Thank you very much! Your CV template is the most beautiful I could find ;)

    Reply
  • Tom Walton
    January 21st, 2013 at 1:36 pm

    Hi Tom,

    Have you seen the LaTeX CV template on http://www.writelatex.com – you can open it for editing in their online editor with one click. Is pretty neat (the original template is from howtotex)

    cheers,
    Tom

    Reply
  • Chaanakya
    February 12th, 2013 at 5:18 am

    This post was really nice. Thank you :) One suggestion/improvement: for the address/other info, you could use this code instead, which would put the address and other info flush against the left/right side respectively:

    \begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
  \begin{flushleft}
    666 Devil St. \\
    Hell
  \end{flushleft}
\end{minipage}
\begin{minipage}[ht]{0.48\textwidth}
  \begin{flushright}
    666-666-6666 \\
    satan@gmail.com
  \end{flushright}
\end{minipage}
    Reply
  • lazhar
    April 22nd, 2013 at 10:49 am

    hello everybody , please can you give me a different links to download Latex

    Reply

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