How to Write a Resume in LaTeX

Ganges34

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posted on 13 years ago — updated on 1 second ago

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While Microsoft Word can be great, when it comes to writing technical documents like engineering reports, Word is irritating to say the least. LaTeX is a technical document creation program that allows engineers to write technical document without all that worry about formatting. This tutorial will let you create a simple resume in LaTeX in order to give a general introduction to creating LaTeX documents. Here is what you will create.

Steps

Writing a Resume in LaTeX

The first step is to download a free copy of a LaTeX editor. Although any LaTeX editor should work. This article is written specifically for TeXworks.

When you open up Tex Works you should see a screen like this:

Change the top left menu to pdfLaTeX: I also would suggest going into Format/Syntax Highlighting and selecting LaTeX, as this will make your code easier to read.

Make the Header

In LaTeX you write your document in the same manner that would would in Word, except you have to use commands like:

The return key also plays a key role in designing LaTeX documents. If you return twice as if to make a new paragraph, LaTeX will treat that as a new paragraph and ignore any formatting code used for the previous paragraph. We will see how this comes in handy later.

At this point your document should look like this:

Making the Body

The next part of your resume should be some simple objective and summary type sections. This can easily be accomplished by making headers and following them with text. Here is an example:

Below are examples of how your text should look in LaTex and how your document should look so far:

Extra Helpful Commands

While this may look a little bit silly on the sample resume we created, it serves the purpose of demonstrating how you can make columns in LaTeX. In order to do a list of known programming languages I used the following command:

Here is a sample of \hfill using the following code: