LaTeX for your Resume / CV

I’m far from a ninja when it comes to but I’m a big fan. I’ve written a bit about formatting logical expressions for past homework exercises. I’ve also used it in blog posts for doing the same. It’s a very useful tool even if you’re just a using basic templates like me.

A major driver behind my work on this website was the desire to get some of my technical work out into the public domain. Around the same time I started blogging I told myself that I should host my resume on this site as an incentive to keep it up to date. I failed pretty miserably there.

But when I took my position with Citrix nearly a year ago I updated my CV and now I’m resolving to keep it that way. It’s never an easy task to drag an old CV into the modern age and mine had been formatted using a very old style called res from RPI. Instead of struggling to keep the style usable on a modern toolchain I took on migrating to the newer tucv from CTAN.

This was a catalyst for all sorts of useful stuff like getting my CV into a git repo and generally refreshing the content. I’ll be putting together an ‘about’ page this site where I’ll host it and make the source available as well.

Till then here’s a quick set of instructions for getting tucv working on Debian Wheezy:
Unfortunately I wasn’t ablt to find tucv in any of the Debian latex / texlive packages. So to get tucv working I had to get the basic latex and texlive packages. Once this was done I had to download the .dtx and ,ins files manually.

Figuring out how to generate a style file from these sources and where to put them was the next trick. A bit of web searching turned up a manual describing how to use LaTeX on Debian:

1. Just copy these files to /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/tucv.
2. Compile both files using latex

to generate the package and documentation.

3. Registering the new style using mktexlsr or texhash.

Then all you have to do is make your resume! Following the examples from the CTAN website is the best way to go. Personally I already had significant amount of content so most of my time was spent playing with layout.

It’s not perfect and I’ll be playing around to see if I can get better spacing in some of the sections that have a two column layout. The right most column is too narrow and forces date ranges on to multiple lines and I’m not a big fan of how that looks.