Articles Computer

Writing a CV in LaTeX

March 16, 2009 62 Comments

Introduction
I have recently ended my master thesis at the university and needed to have a nice looking CV to show future employers. I have been using LaTeX for all my work at the university and saw no reason to start using anything else to create my CV.

Unfortunately there is no official CV template for latex but a a friend of mine, Stine Kildegaard directed me in the direction of resume.cls file at http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/?p=54. This class is again based on the work found in http://www.biostat.harvard.edu/~paciorek/computingTips/computingTips.html. I have personally hacked this template a bit my self to get wide margins and better fit for a A4 paper.

cv

Using the template
First download the file resume.cls. Once again this almost identical to the resume.cls from http://linux.dsplabs.com.au/?p=54 but with my page margin and A4 paper hacks.

The downloaded resume.cls should be placed in the same folder as the cv.tex file. Once this is done the only thing left is to include in the in main tex file:

\documentclass[margin,line,a4paper]{resume}
 
\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}
\usepackage[english,danish]{babel}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{graphicx,wrapfig}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage[colorlinks=true, a4paper=true, pdfstartview=FitV,
linkcolor=blue, citecolor=blue, urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}
\pdfcompresslevel=9
 
\begin{document}
{\sc \Large Curriculum Vitae -- Thomas R. N. Jansson}
\begin{resume}
    \vspace{0.5cm}
    \begin{wrapfigure}{R}{0.6\textwidth}
         \vspace{-1cm}
        \begin{center}
        \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{me}
        \end{center}
         \vspace{-1cm}
    \end{wrapfigure}

The class supports some special sections styles which are easy to use

   \section{\mysidestyle Extracurricular activities}\vspace{1mm}
    \begin{description}
    \item[2008 July 21 $\rightarrow$ 1 August ] Attended the ESA sponsored
        summer school in Alpbach, Austria. The subject was "Sample Return from
        Moon, Asteroids and Comets".
    \item[2007 December $\rightarrow$ ] Editor at Kvant.  Kvant is the members
        magazine for ``Dansk Fysisk Selskab'', ``Astronomisk Selskab'', ``Selskabet
        for Naturlærens Udbredelse'' and ``Dansk Geofysisk Forening''. 3000 copies
        four times a year.
    \end{description}

Eksample
Using the resume.cls described earlier I create my own CV and I am really happy with the result. For those interested in inspecting the details:

Only registered users can comment.

  4. hey. your cv looks awesome but i can’t get it to work! the image won’t stay aligned to the right. is there any chance you can post the source for main.tex?

    Reply

  5. I can give you this snippet containing the picture if that helps. I need to clean the whole tex file before I publish it, so for now, this will be it. 🙂

    \begin{document}
{\sc \Large Curriculum Vitae -- Thomas R. N. Jansson}
\begin{resume}
    \vspace{0.5cm}
    \begin{wrapfigure}{R}{0.6\textwidth}
         \vspace{-1cm}
        \begin{center}
        \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidth]{me}
        \end{center}
         \vspace{-1cm}
    \end{wrapfigure}
 
    \section{\mysidestyle Personal\\Information}%\vspace{2mm}
    Thomas R. N. Jansson \\
    Allersgade 18, 2 tv.  \\
    2200 Copenhagen N \\
    Denmark \\
    tel: +45 29722392 \\
    \href{mailto:tjansson@tjansson.dk}{tjansson@tjansson.dk} \\
    \href{http://www.tjansson.dk}{www.tjansson.dk}\\
    Reply

  6. wow ok well, putting in your personal information section made it work. i think it’s cause the \begin{description} … \end{description} section was pushing the image down, maybe…. anyway. thanks thomas, you rock!

    by the way, did you manage to get a job using this cv?? 🙂

    Reply

  7. Glad to hear that you could use it. 🙂

    I actually only had the opportunity to use the CV once since I was hired as a geophysicist for Schlumberger after I wrote this which is great.

    Reply

  12. Hi, helped me a lot, though the “indent” seems to vary from section to section (at least in my output)…

    Anywho:
    Ubuntu rules!!! 😉

    Reply

  13. Hay Thomas
    When i use your little nice guide i have a problem. The text does not wrap around the image. Do you have any idea why this is happening? The wrapfig.sty i loaded..

    Reply
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  18. I’m so sorry to bother you, but LaTeX is driving me crazy all the time (maybe is just because I’m only a psychologist), the point is that I’ve tried to use your template, but it doesn’t compile (“Missing: begin{document}”, and that it’s not true!). I really love LaTeX, but it is not an easy “love” 😉 Thanx for your help anyway!

    Reply

  19. Hi Haidée

    I didn’t post a template, but really more a couple of code snippets, so it is incomplete missing both \begin{document} and \end{document}. I will upload a complete version of my CV, so you can copy and edit my CV.

    Even though you most likely know it already, I can recommend the following introduction to LaTeX. It is really good:
    The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2 (PDF)

    Kind regards
    Thomas Jansson

    Reply

  21. Hi Thomas,

    Thanks for publishing the source file for your cool CV!

    I had a query, why is it that the legibility of the font is somewhat light (rather than dark). For example, have a look at the samples on –

    http://www.math.uic.edu/~hurder/math589/vita.html

    (these are made using moderncv)

    The font seems much darker even on the Classic Style CV’s on this site. I am a complete beginner in LaTex, so maybe I’m asking a silly question!

    The other issue was that I wanted to make a CV on Letter rather than A4 and so I modified your source by replacing –

    \documentclass[margin,line,a4paper]{resume}
    with
    \documentclass[margin,line]{resume}

    and

    \usepackage[colorlinks=true, a4paper=true, pdfstartview=FitV,
    linkcolor=blue, citecolor=blue, urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}
    with
    \usepackage[colorlinks=true, pdfstartview=FitV,
    linkcolor=blue, citecolor=blue, urlcolor=blue]{hyperref}

    In any case, if you had any suggestions about any changes I would need for getting a darker font and for doing the whole thing on Letter, they would be much appreciated.

    Thanks again,

    Tushar

    Reply

  22. it is very helpful. I have been wandering here and there for last two months and now I got the way on which I have to go.
    Thanks a lot.

    Reply

  23. Hi Tushar

    I think this is mostly an issue when viewing the files on screen and not in print, but you are right, in Adobe acrobat reader my CV font definitely looks less legible.

    I made mine using TeX live pdflatex on Ubuntu and I am using the standard LaTeX font, so initially I thought it was because the CV’s you refered to were using other fonts as lmodern or somthing like this, but when you look at CV_Florek.pdf and the associated CV_Florek.tex it is very simple. The standard article class is used, no alternative fonts are used and all of the style is done in hand in the document, so I am guessing it might be due to the CV being done by:
    tex > dvi, dvi >ps, ps >pdf.
    Whereas my is done by
    tex > pdf
    Maybe the font included or rendered in Acrobat reader differs when using these different methods. I can’t test it out at the moment as I am away for christmas, but maybe I will when I get time.

    Merry Christmas and kind regards
    Thomas Jansson

    Ps. Bijkamjit – glad to hear you could use it.

    Reply

  24. Can you convert this do .doc ? I would like to have this but im not sure whats the point if i cant send my cv with .doc extension because not many people know what latex is. Can you explain is this possible to have same cv in .doc format ?

    Reply

  25. Hi John

    LaTeX is very different from what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) programs as Word. A latex document (.tex) is compiled into a ouptut such as pdf. See LaTeX [wikipedia] and lshort.pdf a great introduction to LaTeX.

    It is not possible to transform .tex into .doc easily (if at all), but there shouldn’t be a need to either. PDF is very well support on most platforms: Linux, Mac and Windows. .doc files are only rendered nicely in Microsoft Word on selected platforms (Windows and Mac). I you would like to use this template you will need to learn LaTeX and produce PDF’s (it is really not so complicated as it looks at first glance). Otherwise you will need to try to redo it in Word yourself.

    Kind regards
    Thomas Jansson

    Reply

  26. Wow..I have been searching all over the net for a nice looking tex template. This is it. Thanks a lot for sharing Thomas.

    Best wishes,
    David

    Reply

  27. Now that’s an amazing share! As David, I would like to thank you so much for sharing your CV source code.

    I will try to make my own out of yours. It really helps me.

    Thanks again,
    Kevin

    Reply

  28. Hi, I had the same problem as Tushar. While the .dvi looked fine, the .pdf created using dvipdf or that created using pdflatex looked poor. I found that commenting out the package: \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} in the preamble fixed the problem for me.

    Reply

  29. Hi!

    Great post, really appreciate it!
    I have used this for my own CV now, but I would like to have a little less vertical padding, at least on the bottom of the page. I’ve looked through the resume.cls file, but aren’t able to find any “vertical padding”/”vertical margin height” to alter. I have also tried to include the geometry package, and tried to set vertical margin there, but to no success. (Like this: \usepackage[vmargin=3.5cm]{geometry} This gives me compilation-error: No value specified for margin)
    Could you point me in the right direction?

    Regards, Martin.

    Reply

  30. David and Kevin: Glad you could use it 🙂

    Martin: It is luckily quite easy to change. Try to read this page on LaTeX page layout: LaTeX Page Layout. From this you could as an example use the following in the preamble of your tex document to make the vertical offset a bit smaller and the elongate the textheight to utilize the new space. I use A4 and this looks okay, but you should probably play around a bit especially if you are using US legal paper size instead. 

    \voffset=-0.5in
\textheight=700pt

    Kind regards
    Thomas

    Reply

  31. Ah, that was easy indeed. And a good tip on the layout-page as well. It really gives a good overview of the layout, and how to control it. I’m using A4 as well (Norway), but I felt the margin at the bottom was too extensive. I’ll play around a bit with it, maybe it will grow on me. (No pun intended)

    Thank you for great help, and a happy easter! 🙂

    Regards
    Martin

    Reply

  34. Thank you so much for sharing your resume tamplate! A great help! I now have a very neat CV.

    Reply

  36. Thanks for this nice template. However when I compile my CV i get some characters |||sty at the top as you can see in this screen capture on this link <a href="http://folk.ntnu.no/jjunju/CV/Capture.JPG".

    How can I remove this text?

    Reply

  38. Excellent layout – but I just spend a few hours trying to get a bibtex litterature list in the CV – it turned out that the problem was this line in resume.cls:

    \nofiles % resume’s don’t need .aux files

    Remove this line and everything is fine…

    …Tak for den ellers udmærkede document style…
    Stefan

    Reply
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  40. ejjunju, I think you have a problem in your tex-file. The []]sty is not part of the template, as far as I know.

    Reply

  42. Very nice CV-layout!
    I am having a problem with the letters æ,ø and å in my CV, using your CV as a template. Usually when I apply the norweigian babel package in my texfile I am allowed to write the mentioned letters, and in your texfile the danish package is applied, which shoult suffise. Any thougths on how I can resolve this problem?

    Reply

  43. Børge: Try the “\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc}” and “\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}” I have in my header. Alternatively the “\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}” depending on your fontencoding.

    Reply

  45. Thank you for providing this very nice looking CV 🙂
    I’m going to use it for my application, too 🙂

    Cross your fingers for me 🙂

    Reply

  47. Expling: Add the following to your preamble:

    \pagestyle{plain}
\pagenumbering{arabic}

    This will give you centered page numbers of the foot of the page on each page.

    Reply

  48. heh, I was searching for some resume template, got this one,
    and recognized your thesis advisor! I suppose you used to know late Sergey Senchenko, my colleague and friend of mine.
    this world is small! and google makes its smaller

    Reply

  49. Thank you so much for your hacking in the resume class! I have turned the whole internet upside down to find a decent looking LaTeX CV template and yours is the best by far.

    Reply

  50. Dmitry: Glad you could use it. I don’t think I have met Sergey – the things he did was prior to when I started working with Tomas Bohr. Looks interesting though 🙂

    Meredrica: Happy to see that others can benefit from my hacking 🙂

    Ejjunju: Sorry I never got around to answer your post, but it definitely looks as if you have some unwanted characters in your .tex file or .cls. Can you doublecheck and see if nothing has sneaked in there?

    Reply

  52. When I use \documentclass[a4paper,margin,line]{res}, I get LaTeX Warning: Unused global option(s): for using a4paper as an option.

    Then I decided to specify a4paper in res.cls at \PassOptionsToClass{a4paper,11pt,12pt}{article} \LoadClassWithOptions{article}, but that didn’t change anything.

    I am trying to make XeLaTeX set the paper for a4paper but also not give me this warning.

    Reply

  54. Thanks alot, this looks way more professional than my self-compiled document. Using \tabular{} is pain in the b. I can’t manage to wrap/float my picture wery well with text though, but that’s not the most important bit.

    Reply

  56. Kamil, sure it is complicated, but also very much more powerful. Many books are typeset in LaTeX or Tex – where as I wouldn’t trust Word with anything more than a few pages. A analog could be how a professional camera is complicated to a beginner compared to a point and shoot camera. Surely you can take pictures (or write documents) with both, but a professional DSLR has many more options and possibilities.

    If you are comfortable in Word then nobody is forcing you to use LaTeX, but if you invest a little time in learning LaTeX you would appreciate powerful tool it is.

    Reply

  57. Hi Thomas,
    Thanks for the template – it’s really beautiful!!
    One question for a LaTeX n00b in order to produce letters in the same style: which fonts are you using in your CV, and where can I access (or change) them?
    Thanks a lot in advance,
    Klaas

    Reply

  61. It has been 7 years since I wrote this, so while it is of course possible to add both a footnote and a 3 column setup I have not had a chance to look into it.

    Reply

  62. Dear Thomas,

    I would like to use your template, however I cannot reach the resume.cls from the fiven link.
    Can you please provide a link to resume.cls for me if I may ask?

    Best regards,
    m

    Reply

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