The CV Inn

A recurrent question on this blog and in general concerns the insertion of a picture in a common Curriculum Vitae, with or without LaTeX.
On this topic, my opinion is that a Curriculum without a picture definitely looks more polished because it’s very hard to insert a picture that fits the professional requirements of a resume.

A very nasty but, alas, common occurrence is that of putting a random picture of yourself just for the sake of putting the picture in. Well, let me put this straight:

NEVER put your Facebook/ picture in your CV, unless you use that very social network for business and professional reasons (designers, entrepreneurs, etc.)

Some very straightforward principles apply when putting the picture in your CV:

1. The picture should be clear, small, in business attire (if you apply for a corporations that has a business attire policy). In any case, try to be the person you want to be at the interview, which is not necessarily your Facebook self. Even better, delete your public Facebook Profile if that’s gonna show a picture of you sucking up a 5 pints keg of beer.
2. The picture should not be in utter typographical clash with the rest of the CV. A picture of you trying to lift the “Leaning Tower of Pisa”? No, thank you.
3. White background is the way to go. Either if you are a Photoshop/Gimp master or if you just happen to shoot a photography with a pretty white wall behind, do get a white background photo (examples below)

Now back to LaTeX, how do we code this up?

The textpos package

From the documentation of the package,

This package facilitates placing boxes at absolute positions on the LATEX page.

Just make sure you include the package in your document preable, like this:

\usepackage{textpos}

and you are ready to go.

We also include dimension references for the units we will be using:

\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{10pt} %controls horizontal movements
\setlength{\TPVertModule}{10pt}  %controls vertical movements

This means that for every time we call the command

\begin{textblock}{<hsize>}(<hpos>,<vpos>)
\includegraphics{picName.jpg}
\end{textblock}

hpos and vpos get multiplied by 10pt (that is, the length we have set \TPHorizModule and \TPVertModule to).

Option 1. Full Body & White Background

In this option, we set a full body with with background on the left of the text, without any impact on the horizontal and vertical motion of the document’s typographical appearance.

\begin{textblock}{1}(-10,0) %
\includegraphics{picName.jpg}
\end{textblock}

Option 2. Face only & White Background

This second option is also acceptable, in my opinion. Just tweak a bit and play with textpos to get the best result out of the picture you have (yours might differ!). I’ve played with the parameters at least 20 times before getting it acceptable.

\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{10pt}
\setlength{\TPVertModule}{10pt}
\begin{textblock}{1}(30,0)
\includegraphics{picName.jpg}
\end{textblock}

Option 3. Face Only & Color Background

Sorry to break it to you, but this is not acceptable!
The picture with this full blown coloured background is just a punch in the eye.
The rectangle at this position of the document breaks its typographical beauty and, more importantly, its horizontal motion.
In other words, the reader and his/her eye do not expect a rectangle at this point, as they’re reading some text and following its flow naturally. In other words, it’s as if they’re hitting their head against a wall all of a sudden.
Also the vertical motion is damaged, because the vertical lines of the rectangle make it difficult to identify the margins of the document.

\setlength{\TPHorizModule}{10pt}
\setlength{\TPVertModule}{10pt}
\begin{textblock}{1}(20,0)
\includegraphics{picName.jpg}
\end{textblock}

Lesson Learned

Don’t put a picture in your CV, unless you know what you are doing.
I, for one, don’t have any intention to throw my picture in my CV any time soon.

The problem with tables in a CV is that they are usually typeset as pairs of date => some job title, or piece of research.

For example, on the left, you can see three different sections:

• A Work Experience section;
• The Education section;
• Another Section for Scholarships

So what happens when you are typesetting the columns of the document, especially the ones with dates?

Dates can be of different length, consider for a moment how Summer and Fall 2010 will generate totally different column width, and the style of a one page document like a CV will suffer from this asymmetry.

So the idea I tried to implement in the document is that of considering all dates as if they belong to the same column (and to the same table obviously), therefore the leftmost column contaning the dates will be as wide as the widest date element.

This date element happens to be Summer 2007, which is quite long indeed, therefore all we need to do now is to create a new length that will store the Summer 2007 length and apply it to the columns.

1. Length Manipulation Macros: \setlength, \newlength, \settowidth

1.a Declaring and Naming a new Dimension Container

\newlength{\datebox}

1.b Storing the length of a Text String into the just created Length \datebox

\settowidth{\datebox}{Summer 2007} % string of text works here
\typeout{\the\datebox} % outputs 75.84961pt

1.c Manually assigning a value to a previously declared Length

\setlength{\datebox}{<dimension>} % string of text doesnt work here
\typeout{\the\datebox} % outputs <dimension>pt

Example usage of \setlength might be

\setlength{\datebox}{1em}
\setlength{\datebox}{1mm}
\setlength{\datebox}{1cm}
\setlength{\datebox}{1pt}

2. Setting the Fixed Table Column Width

Option 1 involves setting the left hand side column as a justified paragraph of length \datebox.

%Table 1
\begin{tabular}{p{\datebox}l}
% first row
[...] & % first cell - width: \datebox
[...]    % second cell - width: variable
 
%Table 2
\begin{tabular}{p{\datebox}l}
% first row
[...] & % first cell - width: \datebox
[...]    % second cell - width: variable
\end{tabular}

Another option is to use \parbox{dimen}{text}

%Table 1
\begin{tabular}{rl} %notice r in place of p{\datebox}
% first row
\parbox{\datebox}{[...text...]} & % first cell - width of the parbox: \datebox
[...]    % second cell - width: variable
 
%Table 2
\begin{tabular}{p{\datebox}l}
% first row
\parbox{\datebox}{[...text...]} & % first cell - width of the parbox: \datebox
[...]    % second cell - width: variable
\end{tabular}

3. Final Result, as per Option 2 \parbox

Useful Links on the Topic: Wikibooks

The PDF Document is available here and the tex source here.

We are going to typeset a very clean and easy layout for a curriculum vitae using LaTeX, currvita and ClassicThesis. While I’m not extremely familiar with those styles, I took inspiration from the code snippet for a CV which is to be found at page 202 of “L’Arte di Scrivere con LaTeX” by Lorenzo Pantieri, available in Italian at [PDF] the author’s website.

As always, a preview of the final document follows (those screenshots are from multiple documents and variations thereof).

Typographic Principle:

Letterspacing  may increase the readability of your text, whereby the principle applies to
a) text set in bold;
b) text set in small caps.
It does not apply to text set in lowercase. In other words, don’t letterspace text set in lowercase.

How does this apply to a Resume?

There are at least two cases in which we can enhance the readability of our Curriculum Vitae or Resume, one which is especially important.

In fact, if you think about it, your name and surname are sitting at the top of the CV, which makes them a focal point where the eye is attracted instantly. This is the reason why your name must be typographically distinguished in some way: typically it is set in bold face, or small caps, or even ALL CAPS!

Problem is, sometimes bold text and small caps benefit from a little letterspacing, so we will see how that is achieved with fontspec and its easy to implement [LetterSpace =  <number>] option when calling the \fontspec{some font} command, as we will shortly show after a visual preview of what we can do.

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I decided to call this template generally “Linux” because I had had the opportunity to bump into the very interesting project called Linux Libertine which intends to develop, build and distribute a new typeface alternative to Times Roman that embraces the principles of open source and free “software”.

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The Typographer

Most of the templates built with LaTeX look like prehistoric documents and are embarassing in that they are usually designed with the standard font, with the standard class, no colours whatsoever, no creativity.

Plain LaTeX — what one would do when writing a math paper, just load a few packages and you’re good to go.

I wanted to showcase the possibility that XeLaTeX offers to customize a lot of aspects of the style of your document, and for the purpose of this tutorial I figured I was a web designer and wanted to showcase, along with my computer skills and my experience, example thumbnails of work as a designer and finishing off the document with a fancy contact section.

A preview follows

Has the Computer Modern Font already bored you?

While I find it extremely clean and elegant, I don’t want people to recognize my typesetting system by the font — especially my Curriculum Vitæ. Indeed, it’s very easy to associate a document to LaTeX when it’s typeset in Computer Modern, headings are not customized, and the style is elegant yet totally predictable (i.e. the “I’ve already seen that elsewhere” syndrome).

Hereby you will find a list and the necessary commands to typeset your document with different, and hopefully more refreshing fonts.
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This tutorial has been contributed to the wikibooks project. You can find it at this link (currently accepted)

Table Data are notoriously hard to read line by line.

In the very same way, grades in a Curriculum can be hard to read.

A nifty and quick workaround is to shade alternate rows with different colours, preferably one white and the other a little darker.

Confused?

Apple will give you a hand: just look at your iTunes — and I will make your job easier by posting a screenshot here (click on them!).

So usual question: how do we go from a normal table to a table with shaded rows, in LaTeX & Friends?

In images, how do we make the transition from the first to the second screenshot?

The answer is simple and it is all a matter of looking into the xcolor package documentation, which provides you with the command which we will be using in order to get the shaded rows.

The package documentation is available, as always, on CTAN.

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How the heck do we make a text box with a color background have its corners rounded? I wondered.

In images, how do we make the transition from the first screenshot below to the second, and maybe even to the third one?

Turns out the answer given from google’s results is more complicated than life (and LaTeX) requires, because, at least given my poor knowledge of LaTeX, \ovalbox and \oval commands don’t necessarily play nice with colours are overall less flexible than the TikZ package.

Now a word of warning: using TikZ for this purpose is a bit like using an atomic bomb to kill a bug, nonetheless using it may entice yourself (and me) to learn it more extensively and exploit it for its other much more powerful applications.

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In this part we will cover the following:

1. Splitting the document with vertically aligned minipages;
2. Designing the Work Experience and Education Section;

The first part of this tutorial is to be found at this post.

Just for a quick recap, this is what we want to achieve as our final result

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