texblog

Writing a CV in LaTeX

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}

\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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