The CV Inn

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.

Here follows the XeLaTeX code to typeset the examples above (which are gathered in the pdf file at the end of the post).

% typeset the lowercase text
\newcommand{\text}{Kramer Seinfeld}
\fontsize{36}{36}
\fontspec{Fontin} %make sure you have Fontin installed
%\bfseries %if you want text in bold face, the second example
%\scshape %if you want text in small caps, make sure you have the font installed
 
\marginpar{\scshape\addfontfeature{Color=FF0000} letterspace}
\text\marginpar{0.0}
 
{\addfontfeature{LetterSpace=2.0}
\text\marginpar{2.0}}
 
{\addfontfeature{LetterSpace=5.0}
\text}\marginpar{5.0}

Letter Spacing in XeLaTeX

Next CV Typographic Tip will be about emphasizing text, how much should you emphasize your text so that it doesn’t look like this (see the Not so short introduction to LaTeX)?

By the way, anyone ever heard of “Seinfeld”?

Related posts:

1. Alternate Row Shading in LaTeX Table
2. The “Linux” LaTeX CV Template
3. Advanced two-column LaTeX CV Template | Part 1
4. LaTeX Guide to putting a picture in your CV
5. Non-prehistoric LaTeX Resume Template — Advanced Graphics and Typography